The Pope, who had refused to receive officially the envoys of her rival, bade the Queen be of good cheer, for he would not desert her. “You are expiating,” he replied, “the faults of your father-in-law, who declined to offer Us aid against the Turks, and of your husband, who would not even take the trouble to meet Us when We were at Mantua. So We said, ‘the House of Savoy despises the Church’”—a remark which might have been taken from a clerical newspaper of our own day. Pius II concluded by the promise of horses and money for the journey to her father-in-law’s Court in Savoy. She remained on this occasion some ten days more in Rome, until she had seen the chief churches and had had four or five audiences with the Pope, who gave her much corn and wine for revictualling Cérines and twelve horses and 200 ducats for her journey. On November 5 she wrote from San Ciriaco to the Florentine Republic, stating that her business with the Pope was terminated, and asking for a passport for the dominions of Florence. On the 20th she reached Bologna, where she was lodged gratis at the “Osteria del Leone[914],” and whence she proceeded by way of Venice and Milan to Savoy. The Duke of Milan and the Council of Geneva gave her a good reception; but her father-in-law told her plainly that the connection with Cyprus had “exhausted” his Duchy, and complaint was afterwards made of the expense of entertaining her for nearly four months at Lausanne and Thonon, where the Court then was. Her appeals to the King of Aragon and to Pierre-Raymond Zacosta, the new Grand Master, were in vain; so, after bequeathing the Crown of Cyprus to the House of Savoy in the event of her death without heirs, the indomitable Queen returned in September of 1462 to her island, and shut herself up once more in the royal apartments at Cérines. Having obtained so little from the Christian Powers, she sent the Count of Jaffa to ask the aid of Mohammed II, offering to pay tribute and to surrender a city of the island to the Turks—a fact, which is probably the origin of the erroneous statement of the Greek historian, Phrantzes[915], that Mohammed II rendered Cyprus tributary. The Sultan’s reply was to order her envoy to be sawn asunder. Meanwhile, her craven husband had abandoned Cérines and fled to Rhodes, whence he returned to Savoy in 1464. At last, when the garrison of Cérines was reduced to eat the cats that prowled along the battlements, the Queen likewise sought refuge in Rhodes, whither many of her knights and vassals accompanied her. Sor de Naves surrendered the castle to her relentless enemy, who thus, in October, 1463, was King of all Cyprus, save where the Banca di San Giorgio still held Famagosta.

The heroic Queen did not despair of recovering her Kingdom. She wrote from Rhodes a year later to her husband, urging him to send assistance, and telling him that her poverty alone prevented her from reconquering it. But Louis had had enough of both his consort and his castles, as the Italian chronicler[916] tells us, and remained for the rest of his life, which ended in 1482, in his native land, without occupying himself with either. Queen Charlotte continued to reside for several years in Rhodes, whence she could watch Cypriote politics and where she received a monthly allowance from the Order. The Holy See continued to recognise her as lawful sovereign of Cyprus; and in 1471, when the usurper sent the Archbishop of Nicosia to Rome to ask the Pope to crown him King and to give him in marriage the hand of Princess Zoe, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos and then a young widow, living there under the care of Cardinal Bessarion, His Holiness refused both requests. This is the version of the contemporary Greek chronicler; but the Italian annalist cynically remarks that the Pope agreed to crown him if he would marry the Holy Father’s niece, but that when the King of Cyprus saw the lady’s portrait and heard her habits, he declined the crown on such terms. Instead, he married the famous Catherine Cornaro, who in 1489 brought the Kingdom of Cyprus to Venice.

Upon the death of the bastard in 1473, we find Queen Charlotte renewing her attempts to recover the island. She then waited at Rhodes, and endeavoured to negotiate with the Sultan of Egypt, who arrested her envoy, and with the Venetian Admiral then in the Levant, who plainly told her that he marvelled at her ignorance of the fact that kingdoms were obtained by might not by right, and that Catherine Cornaro was the adopted daughter of his government. A plot to deliver Cérines to her failed; and, although there was a party in the island favourable to her, most of the Cypriotes preferred the Venetians, as being better able to protect them. Venice ordered her exclusion from the coveted kingdom, many of her followers abandoned her, when they found that all chance of a restoration was over, and in 1475 she settled at Rome in the Palazzo Spinola, or dei Convertendi, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, where from September, 1476, Sixtus IV gave her a monthly allowance of 200 ducats. But in her Roman exile she did not abandon her schemes for the recovery of Cyprus. She had adopted Alonzo, son of Ferdinand I, King of Naples, and her plan was to proceed to Cairo on a Genoese galley, and thence, with the aid of the Sultan of Egypt, to recapture her throne. The Sultan actually invested her with the crown, and Venice was so much alarmed that a Venetian envoy was authorised to proceed to Rome, and offer her an annuity of 5000 ducats, if she would consent to reside on Venetian territory. Her schemes failed; she returned to Rome in 1482, and continued to be the honoured pensioner of the Pope. Such was the honour which he showed her, that in November, 1483, on the occasion of an audience, she was granted a seat “neither less distinguished nor lower than the chair of the Pontiff”—a mark of attention, so the contemporary diarist[917] remarks, “which was not approved by some.” On February 25, 1485, she ceded the Kingdom of Cyprus to her nephew Charles, Duke of Savoy, whose descendants, the present Italian dynasty, have thus inherited from her the titles of Kings of Cyprus, Jerusalem and Armenia. This document was executed in the presence of several Cardinals, of her Cypriote confessor, and of her councillor, James Langlois, who acted as interpreter. In return for this act of cession, the Duke agreed to pay to his aunt, as long as she remained in Rome, an annual pension of 4300 florins and to provide her with a residence worthy of her rank. A subsequent deed charged this pension upon the rates of Nice. The Queen did not long enjoy this annuity; on July 16, 1487, she died at her Roman residence of paralysis, and was buried in St Peter’s “near the chapel of St Andrew and St Gregory,” and not far from the spot, where, eleven years before, her faithful Chamberlain, Hugh Langlois, lord of Beirût, had been laid to rest. Eleven Cardinals were present at the mass held in St Peter’s for the repose of her soul; but her body was not allowed to rest permanently where it had been placed. In 1610, at the time of the destruction of the old basilica by Paul V, her tomb was opened, when it was found to contain the remains of a woman of moderate height, a few pieces of black silk, and some gilded buckles[918]. These remains were then re-interred in their present resting-place in the crypt of St Peter’s, where a slab in the pavement bears the simple inscription: “Karola Hierlm̅ Cipri et Armenie Regina obiit XVI Julii an D. MCCCCLXXXVII.” Other memorials of the exiled Queen of Cyprus still exist in Rome. One of the pictures (no. XXXI) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents her as kneeling before Sixtus IV, and the inscription below describes how “Charlotte, Queen of Cyprus, despoiled of her kingdom and her fortune, flees as a suppliant to Sixtus IV, and is received by him with the utmost benignity and munificence.” Torrigio adds, that on this occasion the voluble Queen felt unequal to the task of expressing her admiration for and gratitude to her benefactor. I think it is possible to identify the personages who are depicted behind the kneeling Queen. The two divines are probably John Chafforicios, her confessor, and Lodovico Podochatoro, a member of a well-known Cypriote family, who became secretary of Alexander VI and a Cardinal, and whose monument is still admired in Sta Maria del Popolo. The laymen are, I would suggest, Hugh Bousat and his wife, Charlotte Cantacuzene de Flory, daughter of the Count of Jaffa, who were her pensioners and who were in receipt of a small papal allowance as late as 1513, and Philip Langlois, who lived about 40 years in Rome, and was granted an annuity of 15 ducats from Julius II, increased to 20 in that year. The vestments, altar cloths, and the four lbs. of silver, which the Queen bequeathed to St Peter’s, have disappeared, but another proof of her piety is to be found in her entry, recorded in Latin by her own hand, into the Confraternity of the Santo Spirito on March 27, 1478. An example of the seal, which she used in Rome, is preserved in Turin, and reproduces the streamers of the Cypriote Order of the Sword, while her two rare coins are, I believe, in the King of Italy’s collection. Her little band of courtiers lingered on for many years here; Innocent VIII recommended them to the charity of the Duke of Savoy as distinguished by lineage and virtue; and one of them, Giorgio Flatro, by marrying his daughter to Pietro Aldobrandini, became the ancestor of Clement VIII. As late as January 1520, Leo X assigned 70 ducats out of the alum-mines of Tolfa to two other Cypriotes of the lineage of Lusignan—Eugène and John, natural sons of Queen Charlotte’s rival, whom the cautious Venetian Republic had removed from Cyprus with their mother and sister in 1477, and had imprisoned in the castle of Padua, lest they should embarrass Catherine Cornaro[919]. This is another example of papal generosity, which contrasts with the selfish conduct of the Venetian Republic, and incidentally disproves the statement of Count Mas Latrie[920], that the two illegitimate sons of James II died at Padua, where their sister is buried.

Another exiled Queen was living in Rome at the same time as Charlotte of Cyprus, and, like her, died and was buried here. Most visitors to this city have seen the tomb of the Queen Dowager Catherine of Bosnia in Ara Cœli; but perhaps her story is less familiar, because the very interesting history of Bosnia is little known. Queen Catherine was the daughter of Stephen Vuktchich, the Duke of St Sava, from whom the Herzegovina derives its name, and boasted her descent through her mother Helen from the mediæval Princes and Tsars of Serbia. Like her father and most of the Bosnian rulers and nobles of the fifteenth century, she belonged to the Bogomile or Patarene heresy, which corresponded with the Albigensian heresy of Provence, which coloured several centuries of Bosnian history, largely contributed to the Turkish conquest of that country, and survived there in the case of one family down to the memory of persons still living. Owing, however, to the efforts of the papal legate, the young Princess was converted to Catholicism probably at the time of her marriage in 1445, or 1446, to King Stephen Thomas of Bosnia. A Slav poet has commemorated her beauty and sung of her wedding; but her fate was hard, and many a tragedy was in store for her. To marry her, Stephen Thomas had put away his first wife, a woman of obscure birth, whom his proud barons would not accept as their Queen, and it was the discarded consort’s son, Stephen Tomashevich, who murdered him to obtain the crown on July 10, 1461, assassination or abdication being the usual alternative of Balkan monarchs. Thus, at the age of 37, Catherine was left a widow, with two children of her own, Sigismund and Catherine. In view, however, of the political situation, the stepmother and the stepson agreed to bury the past, and the Queen Dowager remained in Bosnia till the fall of the Kingdom in 1463. Both her children were then captured by the Turks and forced to embrace Islâm, while she managed to escape to the Republic of Ragusa, where the authorities offered her an annual rent for the land and houses of her late husband, and where she presented “marvellous choral books,” destroyed by fire in 1667, to the Franciscan convent. Thence she crossed the Adriatic and came to Rome, where we find her in receipt of a monthly pension of 100 ducats from 1466. In addition to this, Pope Paul II paid to one Jacopo Mentebone, a Roman citizen, a sum of 20 ducats a month from October, 1467, “for the rent of a house let with all the necessary utensils to the Queen of Bosnia.” At the time of her death, she was residing “near the Church of San Marco de Urbe in the Rione Pigna,” surrounded by a considerable court of faithful Slavs, and she was a personage of importance, figuring for example at the wedding of Zoe Palaiologina in 1472. She had, however, bitter disappointments. Her father, the Duke of St Sava, who died in 1466, cut her out of his will; the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, whom she begged to lend her money for ransoming her children, declined to assist her. After a twelve years’ residence here, she felt her end approaching, and on October 20, 1478, made her last testament, a very curious document of great political interest. After directing that she should be buried in the church of Ara Cœli, she expressed the hope, that one day the Kingdom of Bosnia would once more submit to Christian rule—an aspiration accomplished in October, 1908. Meanwhile, mindful of the munificence of the Holy See and of the benefits which she had received from Paul II and Sixtus IV, who had always treated her hospitably, helping her according to her royal dignity with an annual pension and provision sufficient for her necessities, she bequeathed her kingdom in trust to the Holy See, until such time as her son or her daughter should return “from the vomit of Mahomet” to the true faith. Should they, however, remain Mohammedans, then Bosnia was to be at the absolute disposition of the Pope and his successors. It was this clause which prompted a well-known Slavonic journalist in Rome to announce immediately after the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, that the Emperor Francis Joseph would receive the Bosnian crown, as the last native King of Bosnia had received it, from the hands of the Pope. Having thus disposed of her phantom kingdom, Catherine proceeded to bequeath the rest of her real and personal property to the three faithful ladies-in-waiting, Paola Mirkovich, Helena Sempovich and Maria Misglenovich, who had shared her Roman exile. To the first she also left a legacy of 50 ducats, a dress of black satin lined with squirrel, and another of black cloth lined with lynx; to the second 25 ducats and a long gown of black cloth with a lining of marten-skin; to the third 30 ducats and a long, simple gown of black cloth. To her major-domo, Radich Klesich, she left 50 ducats, a scimitar inlaid with silver, and a Turkish dress of red silk woven with gold, as well as a sum of 38 ducats, which she had borrowed from him; to her servants, George Zubravich and Abraham Radich, respectively 50 and 30 ducats. To her son Sigismund she bequeathed his father’s sword, inlaid with silver; but, if he remained an infidel, the precious heirloom was to pass to her nephew Balsha, whom we find thirty years later as titular “Duke of St Sava.” To both her children she also left a silver dagger, two cups and two tankards of silver, with lids inlaid with emeralds. To the church of Ara Cœli she devised her royal mantle of cloth of gold and a silk dossal of divers colours for the altar, which had been used in her private chapel; to the hospital of San Gerolamo degli Schiavoni all the furniture and sacred vessels of the latter. The relics in her possession she bequeathed to the Franciscan church of St Catherine at Jajce—a church in which she had always been deeply interested. In 1458, at her request, and again in 1462, Pius II had granted indulgences to all who visited this church, which was believed to contain the body of St Luke, brought thither from the castle of Rogus in Epeiros[921], and of which a beautiful Italian campanile still remains. Finally, after naming her executors, she directed that her will, together with the royal sword, should be presented to the Cardinal bishop of Porto, the vice-chancellor of the Church, then Rodrigo Borgia, afterwards Pope Alexander VI.

Five days later the testatrix died, and was buried in Ara Cœli, as she had directed. It is said that over her grave was placed a Slavonic inscription, which ran as follows: “To the Bosnian Queen Catherine, daughter of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, and of the race of Helen of the house of Tsar Stephen, and wife of the Bosnian King Thomas, who lived 54 years and died in Rome October 25, 1478, this Monument was erected by her own written orders.” This Slavonic inscription has, however, long ago disappeared. It was fortunately copied by Palatino[922] in 1535 as an example of Slavonic writing from the monument in Ara Cœli, with an accurate Latin version. Casimiro Romano[923], the historian of that church, states that the monument of Queen Catherine, with that of Cardinal Alibret, was moved from the floor of the presbytery in front of the high altar in 1590 to its present position on a pillar behind an ambon to the left as one faces the altar. The Slavonic inscription was probably then lost and the present Latin inscription substituted. This latter corresponds with neither the Slavonic text nor the truth; for it describes how “To Catherine, the Bosnian Queen, sister of Stephen, Duke of St Sava, born of the race of Helen and of the house of Prince Stephen, wife of Thomas, King of Bosnia, who lived 54 years and fell asleep at Rome on October 25, 1478, this monument was erected by her own written orders.” This inscription was obviously composed by someone ignorant of her genealogy, for she was the daughter, not the “sister” of Duke Stephen, and the word sorori is probably a misunderstanding of the Slav poroda (“race”). On either side of her head is a coat of arms, that of her husband and that of her father. The latter is so greatly worn, that it can no longer be distinguished, but the former, which I examined from a ladder, still shows, on a close inspection, the two crowns and the two horsemen, but not the mailed arm with the sword, which was in the centre, as may be seen from the representation of this monument in Ciacconius’ Lives and Acts of the Popes and Cardinals. The two crowns in the quarterings are those of Bosnia and Serbia, for from 1376 the Bosnian Kings always styled themselves also Kings of Serbia; the arm with the sword represents Primorje, or “the Coastland”—also a part of the Bosnian royal title; the two horsemen are the Kotromanich emblem. Considering the worn appearance of the actual monument, and the sharply cut lettering of the Latin inscription, I think that the latter can never have been placed on the floor of the church, but was a later addition, cut at a time when the Slavonic inscription was misunderstood, or perhaps even mislaid. It is said by Luccari[924], the old historian of Ragusa, that another portrait of Queen Catherine exists in Rome, and is to be found in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican, where a woman in the foreground may perhaps be the Queen.

The Pope did not forget the household of the testatrix. From the next month after her death her three ladies, Paola, Helena, and Maria, with a fourth named Praxina, received 14 ducats monthly from the papal treasury. Her will did not, however, prevent him from recognising another person as King of Bosnia. One of the paintings (No. 27) in the Santo Spirito hospital represents the visit of “the King of Bosnia and Wallachia” to the Pope, and the inscription adds how this monarch “although exhausted by age visits the thresholds of the Apostles and submissively venerates Sixtus IV by kissing his feet.” It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to ask who this mysterious personage was, although the last native King of Bosnia had been killed eight years before the accession of Sixtus IV, and the conjunction of the crowns of Bosnia and Wallachia is curious. It is not difficult, however, to identify this sovereign. One of the old books, which alludes to the picture, calls him “N.” which is the initial of Nicholas of Ilok on the Danube (the place where Prince Odescalchi’s Hungarian castle is situated). This great magnate, when the Hungarians temporarily captured Jajce from the Turks, received from Matthias Corvinus in 1471 the title of “King of Bosnia”—by which he is described in papal documents[925] of 1475-6. As he was also voivode of Transylvania, whose inhabitants were Wallachs, he is called also “King of Wallachia” in the inscription. His visit to Rome may be fixed from a letter of Sixtus IV, dated May 2, 1475, in which he is stated as having been “lately present.” Doubtless, he came for the Jubilee of that year, and this is the explanation of Wadding’s erroneous statement, that Queen Catherine did not come to Rome till 1475.

Another Slavonic sovereign sought refuge in Rome. This was Stephen Brankovich, Despot of Serbia, who had been blinded by Murad II years before, and who, after the fall of his country had sought a refuge with Skanderbeg, the heroic champion of the Albanians. There he married Angelina, sister-in-law of Skanderbeg and daughter of Giorgio Arianiti, a great Albanian chieftain. As the struggle in Albania became more and more desperate, Skanderbeg, at the end of 1465, came to Rome to ask the aid of Paul II, who received him with extraordinary honours, due to one who was “the first soldier of Jesus Christ.” A memorial of his stay here is the Vicolo Scanderbeg, where the house, No. 116, bears his portrait over the door with the following inscription: “Geor. Castriota A. Scanderbeg Princeps Epiri ad fidem iconis rest. an. Dom. MDCCCXLIII.” Thence, at the end of January, 1466, he returned to defend his fortress of Kroja, where two years later he died, and Albanian independence with him. Before that event the Serbian Despot had left him for Rome, for from December, 1467, he was drawing a papal pension of 40 ducats a month, continued to his widow from December, 1479. Here, too, her brother Costantino Arianiti found a living, becoming protonotary apostolic under Sixtus IV, who gave him a monthly pension of 32 ducats from October, 1476, increased to 40 from November, 1479—not, indeed, much to keep up the position of one who styled himself “Prince of Macedonia.”

The Turkish annexation of the County Palatine of Cephalonia in 1479 brought another band of Oriental exiles to Rome. The Tocco family, however, which had ruled over the dominions of Ulysses for more than a century, had gone from Benevento to Greece, and Leonardo III was, therefore, merely returning to the land of his forebears. On February 29, 1480, he arrived in Rome with his son Carlo and his brothers Giovanni and Antonio. A man so well connected was sure of a good reception—for he had married a niece of King Ferdinand of Naples, while the Pope’s nephew had married his sister-in-law, and he was himself related to the Imperial houses of both Byzantium and Serbia. Accordingly, the Cardinals’ servants met him outside the Lateran Gate and escorted him to the house which he had hired between the Via Pellicciaria and the Botteghe Oscure. Sixtus IV, whose predecessor had already given him periodical sums of 1000 to 1200 ducats from 1466, gave him 1000 gold pieces and promised him 2000 a year—an event commemorated by another of the paintings in the Santo Spirito hospital, where we are shown how the Pope “nourished with his royal bounty the rulers of the Peloponnese and of Epeiros, Andrew Palaiologos and Leonardo Tocco.” After staying rather more than a month here, he returned to Naples, leaving his natural son, Ferdinando, behind him—a spirited youth, who once said in the hearing of the diarist, Volaterranus, “though we have lost our rings, we have still got our fingers entire.” Leonardo received valuable fiefs in the south of Italy, but died in Rome under the pontificate of Alexander VI owing to the collapse of his house. His son Carlo III lived in the Via S. Marco, where, after enjoying a monthly pension, he died under Leo X, and we find that Pope paying monthly pensions of 60 and 32 ducats respectively to two other members of the family, Carlo’s sister Raymunda, Contessa de Mirandola, and his son and heir (Giovanni) Leonardo IV, Despot of Arta, and a small sum to Giovanni’s widow, Lucrezia[926]. The family of Tocco has only lately become extinct by the deaths of the Duca della Regina in 1908 and of his only son, the Duca di S. Angelo, in the motor accident near Cassino in 1907. At Naples in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele may still be seen a collection of the family portraits in the fine old Palazzo del Santo Piede (now Troise) so-called, from the foot of St Anna, which Leonardo III brought with him from Greece.

The heirs of the Palaiologoi were less fortunate than those of Leonardo Tocco. Upon the death of Thomas, Cardinal Bessarion drew up a scheme of education for his children, to whom the Pope continued his allowance. He laid it down, that they must not have an expensive retinue, like their father, but that they must be brought up by Latin priests as Latins. They were allowed a Greek doctor, one Kritopoulos, but were to dress like Franks and to show the utmost reverence to the Cardinals. They were to be taught to walk with dignity, to speak in a soft voice, not to stare about them, not to boast of their Imperial lineage but to remember that they were exiles and strangers, forced to live on charity. They were to learn by heart a humble address to the Pope, to talk little, never to laugh, and to acquire the art of kneeling with elegance. In short, they were to be perfect prigs. The result of Bessarion’s educational programme was what might have been expected. Zoe, or Sophia, indeed, soon escaped his tutelage by marrying a Caracciolo, after being regarded as a suitable bride for James II of Cyprus. The historian Phrantzes, an old and tried friend of the family, who was then in Rome on a visit, speaks with enthusiasm of the generosity of the bridegroom. Soon left a widow, and again wooed by the Cypriote King, she married by proxy in St Peter’s in 1472 the Grand Duke Ivan III of Russia—a ceremony commemorated by the above-mentioned painting in the Santo Spirito hospital, in which, besides relieving Leonardo Tocco, Sixtus IV is described as presenting “Sophia, daughter of Thomas Palaiologos, married to the Duke of the Ruthenians, with a dowry of 6000 gold pieces and other gifts[927].” These latter included 4400 ducats for her travelling expenses to Russia, whither many of the family’s retainers followed her, and where, in consequence of her Imperial origin, her husband took the title of Tsar. But her brother Andrew, who remained all his life a hanger-on of the papal court, profited little by Bessarion’s precepts. Falling into dissolute habits, he married a disreputable woman named Catherine; his garments moved the pity or contempt of the Romans; his allowance was reduced, he was relegated to a back seat at papal functions; and, after ceding all his rights to Charles VIII of France at San Pietro in Montorio, he died at Rome in 1502 in such misery that his widow had to beg his funeral expenses from the Pope. His portrait is supposed to be represented in a lunette of the third room of the Borgia apartments, where is also that of the Turkish Prince Djem, younger son of Mohammed II, and so long the prisoner of the Vatican. Thus the son of the conqueror of Constantinople and the nephew of its gallant defender are both depicted in the same room.

Besides these exiled Princes, a number of Greek authors found a permanent or temporary home in Rome, whither their famous fellow-countryman, Bessarion of Trebizond, had preceded them. Created a Cardinal in 1439 for his services to the Union of the Churches, he had shortly afterwards settled in a house to the right of the church of the SS. Apostoli, which gave him his title, and his abode became a literary centre, where Greeks and Italians alike congregated. Theodore Gazes of Salonika, George of Trebizond, and Nicholas Saguntino of Eubœa frequented his house, and another Greek man of letters, Andronikos Kallistos, lived with him, till poverty forced him to migrate to Florence and thence to England, where he died. But with the exception of Bessarion, who rose to be titular Archbishop of Nice and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, as well as bishop of Tusculum, and who narrowly missed being elected Pope on the death of Paul II, these learned fugitives met with the usual fate of scholars. Sometimes their misfortunes were their own fault. Thus George of Trebizond, a man who could not endure criticism, quarrelled with his patron over the rival merits of Plato and Aristotle, with Gazes over their respective translations of the maestro di color che sanno, and with Valla over the pre-eminence of Cicero over Quintilian; at last, this cantankerous old man, the scourge of all authors except Aristotle, crept about Rome in rags supported by a stick, till he found near his humble abode a rest in the church of Sta Maria sopra Minerva, where the inscription on his tomb has long been illegible. His adversary Gazes, for whom Bessarion had obtained a benefice in Magna Græcia, retired thither in disgust, because Sixtus IV paid him only 50 gold pieces for his translation of Aristotle’s Natural History of Animals. Of Bessarion we have still several memorials: the tomb which he erected during his lifetime in the monastery of the SS. Apostoli, the cup which now belongs to the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata, of which he was Abbot commandatory; the beautiful little house, called the casino di Bessarione on the Via Appia within the city near the church of SS. Nereus and Achillios. This “vineyard within the walls of the city in loco qui dicitur S. Cæsarii in Turri sub proprietate ejusdem monasterii S. Cæsarii[928],” he bequeathed in 1467 with his property at “Cecchignola nova extra portam Appii,” on the right of the Via Ardeatina, to the chapel of S. Eugenia in the SS. Apostoli. When the Zona archeologica was being made in 1910, it was proposed to destroy this picturesque house, then an inn, but now deserted; but it was happily spared, after a protest. Argyropoulos, the translator of Aristotle, who died here in 1486, has been immortalised by Ghirlandajo in the Sistine Chapel, where he is the original of the bearded old man in the scene of the calling of the first disciples, and also in the Cancelleria[929]. The list of these literary wanderers may fitly close with Janus Laskaris, the Greek grammarian, founder of a Greek school at the foot of the Quirinal, whose tomb lies not far from the heart of O’Connell in S. Agata in Subura, where a touching epitaph expresses the mingled joys and sorrows of a Roman exile.

5. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM, 1099-1291

No event of the late war was so dramatic, or has made such a powerful appeal to the imagination, as the liberation of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, after a Moslem occupation of 673 years. While the name of Athens is full of meaning for the cultured alone, and many excellent citizens are not quite sure “whether the Greeks or the Romans came first,” that of Jerusalem is known in every peasant’s cottage of Christendom and represents the aspirations of an ancient race scattered all over the globe. But to us Anglo-Saxons the redemption of the Holy City has special significance, because a British general at the head of a force gathered from every part of the British Empire, and aided by our French and Italian allies, has repeated the achievement of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Crusaders, among them a brother of the King of England, and Edgar Etheling, the descendant of our Saxon line, in 1099, and has accomplished what even our lion-hearted monarch failed to do in 1192, and our soldierly Prince Edward in 1271. Thus the aspiration of the poet of Gerusalemme Liberata,

has been realised by Britons from lands whose very existence was unknown at the time of the Crusades.

The present essay is not intended to be a drum-and-trumpet history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and its almost constant wars, but an account of the organisation and social life of the Crusading kingdom. First, as to its extent. The Kingdom of Jerusalem attained its zenith at the end of the reign of Baldwin II in 1131, when it stretched from the Egyptian frontier at El-ʿArîsh, “the river of Egypt” of the Book of Numbers, on the south-west, and from Aila, the modern ʿAkaba (on the gulf of the same name), the Eloth of the First Book of Kings, and the site of Solomon’s Red Sea naval station, on the south-east, to the stream now called Nahr Ibrahîm, which flows into the sea between Beirût and Giblet, the modern Jebeil—about 300 miles as the crow flies. To the east the kingdom rarely overstepped the Jordan except at the triangle of Banias, the ancient Cæsarea Philippi; indeed, in the north it was only thirteen miles broad, but in the Dead Sea region it attained a breadth of 100 miles. This did not, however, comprise the whole of the Latin territory. To the north of the above-mentioned stream stretched the county of Tripolis, of which the foundations were laid by Count Raymond of Toulouse in 1102, to the rivulet, now called Wâdi-Mehika, between Maraclée and Valénia (the modern Bâniyâs), which flowed at the foot of the castle of Margat—a further distance of about 100 miles. From that rivulet began the Principality of Antioch, whose first Prince was, in 1098, Bohemond of Taranto, and which at one time extended almost to Aleppo in the east and embraced a large slice of the Kingdom of Armenia almost as far west as Tarsus, but latterly extended no farther north than a little beyond Alexandretta. On the north-east it was bounded until 1144 by the County of Edessa, the modern Urfa, founded by Baldwin I in 1098, which began at the forest of Marris and extended eastward beyond the Euphrates; but, owing to the permanent state of war, in which the forty-six years of its existence were passed, it never had any fixed boundaries. Thus, a Syrian writer could truly say that, in 1129, “everything was subject to the Franks, from Mardîn and Schabachtana to El ʿArîsh,” far more than the “Dan to Beersheba” of the Israelites[930].

The first diminution of the Crusading States was the loss of the County of Edessa in 1144. In 1170, at the other extremity, they were cut off from the Red Sea by the capture of Aila. Jerusalem and most of the kingdom, except Tyre and a few fortresses, fell before Saladin in 1187, after the battle of Hattin, which the Crusaders identified with the site of the Sermon on the Mount, and the greater part of the Principality of Antioch and of the County of Tripolis in the next year. By the treaty of 1192, the Christians obtained the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; and Frederick II, by the so-called “bad peace” of 1229, recovered the Holy City, except two mosques, the two other towns—Bethlehem and Nazareth—most closely associated with the life of our Lord, and all the chief pilgrimage roads. Fifteen years later, however, the Kharezmians, a Turkish tribe, finally captured Jerusalem, murdered the Latin Christians, and desecrated the Holy Sepulchre and the tombs of the Latin Kings. Saladin, in 1187, had treated Jerusalem as an English gentleman would; the Kharezmians treated it in the German fashion.

The battle of Gaza completed the disaster of 1244. From that time the recovery of Jerusalem was manifestly impossible. The Crusade of the saintly Louis IX was a failure; that of our Prince Edward was weakly supported, ended in a separate peace, concluded by the people of Acre against his will, and was only remarkable for one of the most beautiful stories of conjugal devotion in English history. Meanwhile Antioch had fallen in 1268 before Beibars, the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt; and Jaffa had entered upon the long captivity from which our armies at last redeemed it on November 17, 1917. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was thenceforth a mere phantom of its former self. Kings of Cyprus were crowned Kings of Jerusalem at Tyre, with all the pomp and splendour of the Middle Ages; Acre continued to be, as it had been since its recapture by Cœur-de-Lion, the capital of Frankish Palestine, where even on the eve of its fall, as a traveller[931] tells us, dwelt “the richest merchants under Heaven, gathered from all nations, where resided the King of Jerusalem and many members of his family, the Princes of Galilee and Antioch, the lords of Tyre, Tiberias and Sidon, the Counts of Tripolis and Jaffa, all walking about the squares with their golden coronets on their heads.”

There, too, were the headquarters of the Military Orders, the Templars, the Knights of St John, the Brothers of the German House, and the Masters and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury. But the end of this carnival of Kings and Princes in exile was at hand. Since the second capture of Jerusalem, the kingdom had been slowly but surely dying, as its inhabitants knew full well. Signs and wonders foretold to the pious the coming catastrophe; shrewd business men hastened to sell their property in the doomed country. Tripolis followed the fate of Antioch in 1289; Acre, Tyre, Sidon and Beirût were taken by Melik-el-Aschraf, the Sultan of Egypt, in 1291; and, with the fall of the last two strongholds of the Templars, Tortosa and Château Pèlerin, ended the rule of the Franks in Palestine. In Gibbon’s phrase, “A mournful and solitary silence prevailed along the coast which had so long resounded with the world’s debate.”

Let us now see how Frankish Palestine was organised. At the head of the Latin Kingdom stood the King. During the first three reigns the monarchy was elective; and it was not till 1131 that it became hereditary, as Baldwin II was the first sovereign who left progeny. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, the election of their first ruler was by means of an examination, from which few of us would emerge unscathed. The electors questioned the servants of the various candidates about their masters’ morals and characters. Godfrey’s attendants stated that their master’s chief defect was, that he would linger on in church, after the service was over, asking questions about the images and pictures, and thereby making his household late for meals, “which thus lost all their relish[932].” But this interest in ecclesiastical archæology, which seemed such a drawback to the hungry men-at-arms, was counted as a recommendation by the pious electors, and Godfrey was elected. He declined, however, to take the title of King, preferring that of “Protector of the Holy Sepulchre,” and refusing to wear a golden crown in the city where Our Lord had worn a crown of thorns[933]. His modesty was also probably due to a tactful desire to disarm the opposition of the clergy, who had desired that Jerusalem should not have a lay ruler. He died, however, next year, and Baldwin I, Count of Edessa, his brother, who was elected his successor, then took the title of King, but salved his conscience by being crowned not in Jerusalem, but at Bethlehem. Baldwin II’s daughter, Mélisende, and her husband, Fulk, were the first to be crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, where was also the royal mausoleum. Adelaide, Baldwin I’s Queen, is buried at Patti. During the Moslem occupation of Jerusalem the King was crowned at Tyre; and, when the whole of the Holy Land was lost, the Kings of Cyprus, who were titular Kings of Jerusalem, assumed the former crown at Nicosia and the latter at Famagosta. From Queen Charlotte of Cyprus, in 1485, the title passed to Duke Charles of Savoy, and thus to the present Italian dynasty.

The Latin sovereigns of Jerusalem were mostly above the average in character and intelligence. Bravery and piety were essential to their position as chiefs of a crusading colony in the midst of a hostile country. Godfrey “excelled his contemporaries in the handling of arms and in all the exercises of chivalry”; Baldwin I was described in his epitaph as “a second Judas Maccabæus”—a comparison confirmed by his warlike achievements; of Baldwin II we are told, that “his memory was blessed by all, because of the excellence of his faith and the glorious deeds which ennobled his reign.” Baldwin III was also a lover of literature and a graceful speaker, of whom a Moslem rival said that “there was not such another king in the world.” His brother, Amaury I, prompted Archbishop William of Tyre to compose his valuable history, and both these sovereigns possessed considerable legal knowledge. The Archbishop’s pupil, Baldwin IV, was unfortunately a leper, and Baldwin V died in his boyhood. Fulk was generous and experienced in warfare, but signally lacked the common royal faculty of remembering faces. Queen Mélisende, who was the real ruler in her husband’s lifetime, was an excellent woman of business, of whom it was said that “she had in her bosom the heart of a man[934]”; indeed, so masterful was she, that on one occasion her son had to besiege her in the Tower of David. Unfortunately, Guy de Lusignan, who was King at the moment of Saladin’s fatal attack, was notoriously inferior to the task of saving his wife’s kingdom. Had he not been so good-looking and so irresistible to Princess Sibylla, the fall of Jerusalem might have been at least postponed.

Society was constructed by the crusaders on feudal lines. According to the thirteenth century edition of the Assises de la Haute Cour, by Jean d’Ibelin, Count of Jaffa, one of Godfrey’s first acts was to appoint a commission to enquire from men of various nationalities then in Jerusalem the usages of their respective countries. From the report of this commission were drawn up the usages and assizes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, including a High Court, presided over by the King, for the nobility; a “Court de la Borgesie,” presided over by an officer styled the “Vicomte,” for the middle class; and a third court, under an official, called “rays,” for the Syrians. As time went on, these usages were modified; and, at the arrival of each large batch of new crusaders, the King used to assemble the Patriarch and other notables at Acre, and enquire from the newcomers about their laws, while occasionally special missions of investigation were sent abroad. The written original of the Assises was called the Letres dou Sepulcre, because it was deposited in a large chest in the Holy Sepulchre; and, whenever a moot point arose, this chest was opened in the presence of nine persons, including the King, or his deputy, and the Patriarch, or the Prior of the Holy Sepulchre[935]. The Assizes of Jerusalem, of which the Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois have also been preserved, are the most endurable monument of the Franks in Palestine, and not in Palestine alone; for they formed the basis of the Assizes of Cyprus, and of the feudal organisation of the Principality of Achaia.

William of Tyre expressly tells us[936] that the Counts of Tripolis were always lieges of the King of Jerusalem. But the Princes of Antioch (which had its own code) and the Counts of Edessa seem to have merely recognised him as primum inter pares by virtue of his possession of the Holy City, and the Princes of Antioch, beginning with Bohemond himself, were at times reluctantly forced to confess themselves vassals of the Greek Emperor. Thus, the existence of four practically independent states, instead of one centralised government, and the consequent lack of what the Italians would call a fronte unico against the Infidels, formed one cause of the collapse of Frankish rule, notably in the case of Edessa, sacrificed to the jealousy of the Prince of Antioch. Moreover, feudal regulations impeded the exercise of the royal power. Not only were the lieges not obliged to perform military service outside the realm; not only had the King to consult a great council of magnates on all important questions—for we hear of Parliaments held in the Patriarch’s palace at Jerusalem, in a church at Acre, and at Tyre, Nâbulus and Bethlehem—but Baldwin I was forced to revoke an ordinance for the cleaning of the streets of Jerusalem, because he had omitted to ask the consent of the citizens. Thus, Frankish Jerusalem was a limited monarchy, and its King really only the first of the barons—a system unsuited to a state of almost constant war.

The kingdom proper contained four great baronies—the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, which comprised the fertile plain of Sharon; the seigneurie of Krak and Montréal, which lay in the biblical land of Moab to the east and south-east of the Dead Sea, and dominated the caravan-route from Syria to Egypt; the Principality of Galilee, of which the capital was Tabarie (the Tiberias of St John); and the seigneurie of Sidon, or Sagette. Besides these great baronies, upon which in turn smaller tenures depended, it also included twelve lesser fiefs, likewise directly dependent on the Crown, of which the most curious was that of St Abraham, the mediæval name of Hebron, and the most important that of Toron, founded by a member of the great crusading family of St Omer, which succeeded Tancred in the Principality of Galilee, but played an even more conspicuous part in Frankish Greece than in Frankish Palestine. The romantic title of Prince of Galilee survived at the Cypriote Court after the loss of the Holy Land; and a Lusignan bearing that scriptural name intervened in the tortuous politics of the Morea in the fourteenth century. Nazareth was naturally included in the Principality of Galilee; it was the See of an Archbishop, and was governed by a “Viscount.”

As in Greece, the Latin barons erected castles over the country; and the remains of some of these, particularly Krak de Montréal and Krak des Chevaliers, are among the finest specimens extant of mediæval military architecture, while others, notably that of the famous family of d’Ibelin at Beirût, were decorated with paintings and mosaics by Syrian and Greek artists. We may infer from the description of the castle of St Omer at Thebes in the Chronicle of the Morea, that the subject of these paintings may sometimes have been the Frankish Conquest of the Holy Land, in which the baronial family had taken part.

Each great feudatory presided over the high court of justice of his fief; and the Assizes enumerate twenty of them, besides the King and the Archbishop of Nazareth, who possessed the right of coinage. M. Schlumberger has published a number of these coins, among them those of Jerusalem, bearing a representation of the Holy Sepulchre, the Tower of David, or the Cupola of the Temple. The inscriptions on the coins of Edessa and on some of those of Antioch are in Greek—a proof of the preponderance of the Greek population there. Ecclesiastically, the Latin states of Syria were organised under two Patriarchs—those of Jerusalem and Antioch; and the first Archbishop of the kingdom was he of Tyre, whose function it was to crown the King in the Patriarch’s absence.

The Salic law did not obtain in the Holy Land; and as, by some mysterious law of population, common also to Frankish Greece, many noble families consisted of daughters only, women played an important part in the crusading states. On two occasions, the election of the Patriarch of Jerusalem (Amaury in 1159 and Heraclius in 1180) was due to female influence, and, on the second occasion the personal predilection of the Queen-Mother Agnes prevailed (to the great detriment of Church and State alike) over the disinterested advice of William of Tyre, who urged the election of a candidate from beyond the sea, and recalled an old prophecy that, as the Emperor Heraclius had brought the true cross to Jerusalem, so in the time of another Heraclius would it be lost—a prophecy verified at the battle of Hattin[937]. This was the Patriarch who visited London in 1185 to seek aid from Henry II, and consecrated the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, where a thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Holy City was recently held.

The competition for the hands of noble heiresses was another result of the extinction of families in the male line, and frequently caused serious political complications and encouraged penniless adventurers, like Guy de Lusignan, whose success aroused the jealousy of less fortunate rivals. Thus, the great disaster of Hattin, which led to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, was indirectly due to the revenge of an Englishman, Girard de Rideford, for his failure as a suitor. He had come to the Holy Land as a knight-errant to make his fortune; and Count Raymond II of Tripolis had promised him the hand of his ward, the wealthy heiress of Boutron. A rich Pisan, however, arrived with a weighing-machine, placed the lady (probably an opulent beauty) in one scale and his money-bags in the other, and gave the Count her weight in gold. The baffled Briton became a Templar and rose to be Seneschal and Master of the Order, but never forgot how he had been cheated[938], and persuaded the weak monarch to reject Raymond’s strategy on the eve of Hattin.

An even more romantic but equally fatal example was that of Renaud de Châtillon, who, coming to Palestine as a younger son to seek his fortune in the suite of Louis VII of France at the time of the second crusade, married the widowed Princess-Regent of Antioch, and governed the Principality for his stepson. Local gossips, and especially the Patriarch, criticised this mésalliance, whereupon the audacious Frenchman had the Patriarch stripped, smeared with honey, and exposed, a feast for the flies, during a long summer day. A born soldier of fortune, he put his sword at the disposal of the Greek Emperor for an attack on an Armenian baron, and when a little difference arose as to the payment of the costs of the expedition, paid himself by ravaging the then Greek province of Cyprus. We next find him begging the Emperor’s pardon in his shirt-sleeves, with a rope round his neck. Then he was captured by the Saracens in the course of a cattle-lifting expedition, and kept for fifteen years a prisoner at Aleppo. Finding, on his liberation, that his wife was dead and his stepson reigning at Antioch, he looked out for a second heiress, and found one in the widowed baroness of Montréal. There, in the land beyond Jordan, he was in his element. His next enterprise was, indeed, a bold one. He constructed a flotilla at Krak—“the stone of the Desert,” as it was picturesquely called—conveyed it on camel-back to the Gulf of ʿAkaba, and sailed down into the Red Sea with the object of plundering Mecca and Medina, and conquering the Hedjaz and the Yemen. For this daring attempt, and for intercepting, in time of peace, the Moslem caravan, Saladin swore twice to kill him with his own hand. The second of these acts provoked the invasion which led to the capture of Jerusalem, and in Saladin’s tent, as a captive after the battle of Hattin, the adventurous Frenchman, who declared that, to Princes, treaties were “scraps of paper,” was beheaded. His seal with the gateway of Krak upon it still survives as a memorial of his strange career. The love affairs of the nobles were also sometimes fatal to the interests of the state. Thus the charms of a beautiful Armenian were partly responsible for the loss of Edessa, and an attractive Italian widow was a prominent figure in the last days of Jerusalem.

The middle class was a far more important body than in either the England or the France of that day. Palestine during the Crusades was not visited exclusively for religious or military reasons. Besides being a goal of pilgrimage, it was also what California or Australia was in the middle of the last century—a place where shrewd men of business could make money rapidly. Long before the first Crusade, there had been an Italian colony from Amalfi at Jerusalem, in the capture of which a Genoese detachment had assisted; colonies from Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Marseilles followed; in the monastery of La Cava is a deed of Baldwin IV, granting the ships of the monks access to the Syrian coast; we even find an “English quarter” at Acre[939]. Owing to the small numbers of the nobility, and the constant need of recruiting its ranks after its losses in battle, it was easy for the wealthy members of the middle class to enter the aristocracy, while, from the nature of its occupations, it was thrown into much closer contact with the natives. Mixed marriages were consequently commoner among the bourgeoisie, although Baldwin I and II and Josselin I of Edessa married Armenians, and Baldwin III and Amaury I Greeks.

The issue of these mixed marriages was known as the Poulains[940]. These half-castes, who corresponded to the Γασμοῦλοι of Frankish Greece, are not depicted in flattering terms by contemporary writers. Jacques de Vitry[941], the Bishop of Acre, describes them as “nourished in delights, soft and effeminate, more accustomed to baths than to battles, given to uncleanliness and luxury, dressed in soft garments like women, slothful and idle, cowardly and timid, little esteemed by the Saracens,” with whom they were ready to make peace, and from whom they were prone to accept assistance against their fellow Christians in their internecine quarrels. They were, alike by nature and interest, opposed to the arrival of fresh bodies of Crusaders, because war interfered with their business and interrupted their commercial relations with the Moslems, whose family life they imitated, veiling their wives, shutting them up in Oriental seclusion, and allowing them to go out thrice a week to the baths, but only once a year to church. This undue preference of cleanliness to godliness had disastrous effects, for it led the ladies to intrigue all the more to get out.

The worthy Bishop, speaking doubtless from personal experience, adds that the Poulains swindled the ingenuous pilgrims by overcharges at inns, by exorbitant prices in shops, and by giving them poor exchange. Worse still, they despised these Christian “boxers” and exiles, calling them fatuous idiots for their pains—for to the Poulains the Holy Land had no halo. They wore flowing robes, as even the first King of Jerusalem had done, while a coin of Tancred of Antioch represents him with a turban; and their whole outlook was Oriental rather than European. Indeed, Foucher, Baldwin I’s chaplain, remarked quite early how soon the Westerner became an Easterner in Palestine, and how the Crusader who married an Armenian or a Syrian soon forgot the land of his birth, adopting the comfortable maxim—“ubi bene, ibi patria.” Hence the marked contrast between the Frankish residents, and still more the Poulains, and the newly-arrived Crusaders. Hence, too, the often far too harsh judgments passed by the latter, especially after the second crusade in 1148. Like the Philhellenes, who went to Greece in the War of Independence, expecting to find the Peloponnese peopled by the superhuman heroes of Plutarch, instead of by men like themselves, they did not realise that poor human nature, even under conditions far more favourable, could not have possibly shone resplendent in the tremendous setting of the Holy Land. Consequently, they were often disillusioned, whereas men like William of Tyre, born and living in the country, were far fairer in their judgments, because they measured the Holy Land by the standard of other and more prosaic lands and not by the unattainable perfection of the greatest figure in all history, with whom it must ever be associated.

Society in the Crusading States was, it must be remembered, even apart from the Poulains, an extraordinary mixture of races. Even an Austrian army did not contain so many nationalities as the Crusaders. The Franks, as they were generically called, included Normans (at first the dominant race), French (who ousted the Normans, and thenceforth maintained their influence, culture and language, as they did nearly two centuries later at the Court of Athens), English, Welsh, Irish, Scots, Flemings, Italians, Germans (these not very numerous), and Scandinavians. Jacques de Vitry considered the Italians as the most satisfactory. He describes them as “prudent, temperate in eating and drinking, ornate and prolix in speaking, but circumspect in counsel, diligent in managing their own public affairs, and a very necessary element in the country, not only in battle, but at sea and in business, especially in the import trade. Since they are sober in food and drink, they live longer than other Western nations in the East”; and “they would be very formidable to the Saracens, if they would cease fighting among themselves.” Unfortunately, the rivalries between Venetians, Genoese, and Pisans were even more serious than the feuds between the Normans and the French; and the possession of the Church of St Saba at Acra (two pillars of which are now outside St Mark’s Venice) led to an Italian colonial war, in which we may find one cause of the final loss of the Holy Land. These Italian colonies, indeed, formed practically an imperium in imperio. Their respective quarters in the Syrian towns were the property of their governments, which appointed their officials (called “Consuls” in the Genoese and Pisan colonies, “Bailies” in the Venetian), often from among the most celebrated families of the Venetian Republic. Venice had also what we should call a Consul-General, a “Bailie” for all Syria; and both she and Genoa received a large portion of the harbour dues at Tyre and Acre. The Italian colonies had their own tribunals, like the consular courts in Turkey in our own day. Thus, Italian interests in the Holy Land were considerable and mainly commercial. To Venice and Genoa foreign affairs were—the affairs of their merchants.

The French and the English settlers were “less composed and more impetuous, less circumspect in action and more full of superfluity in food and drink, more lavish in expense and less cautious in talk, hasty in counsel, but more fervent in almsgiving, and more vehement in battle, and most useful for the defence of the Holy Land, and very formidable to the Saracens.”

Besides these various elements among the Crusaders, Palestine contained a large variety of indigenous races. Of these the native Christians of Arab speech, collectively known as Syrians, were the most favoured. Baldwin I gave them marked privileges at Jerusalem, and they could give evidence on oath. But they were of little use in war, except as archers; and are accused by Jacques de Vitry of betraying the secrets of the Christians to the Saracens, whose customs they largely imitated. The Maronites of the Lebanon were, however, noted for their military prowess and for the help which they rendered to the Franks.

Next to the Syrians came the Armenians, reckoned the best fighters of the Orientals, who, from the proximity of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia to the County of Edessa, often assisted the Frank Counts, and copied their feudal arrangements. It is noticeable that the Assizes of Antioch have come to us through the Armenian, and that the Court of Sis, like that of Jerusalem, had its seneschal, its marshal, and its constable. The Greeks were regarded as opponents of the Latins; and, when Saladin took Jerusalem, he allowed them to remain. But we could scarcely expect them to view with sympathy the annexation of the Greek states of Edessa (still governed by a Greek official at the time of the Latin conquest) and Antioch, which only fourteen years before had been nominally a part of the Greek Empire. And Anna Comnena describes her father’s alarm at the march of large armies of foreigners across his rich and peaceful dominions who might (and in 1204 did) say with the Roman centurion: Hic manebimus optime!

Historians of the Moslem Arabs admit that, except in war time, Christians and Moslems lived together in harmony. There are examples of friendship, and even of adopted brotherhood, between Frank barons and Moslem emirs, who used to grant each other mutual permits to hunt. Every reader of The Talisman knows of the mutual courtesies between Richard I and Saladin, who sent medical aid to a sick opponent, but even more curious was the action of Guy de Lusignan, whose first act, on exchanging the Kingdom of Jerusalem for that of Cyprus, was to ask his former captor how to keep the island. Many Franks spoke Arabic; and it was even found necessary for commercial purposes to coin money bearing in Arabic characters the name of Mohammed and the date of the Moslem era! The merchants of Tyre and Acre, where these heretical coins were minted, protested that “business is business”; but the Papal Legate, who accompanied Louis IX on the sixth crusade, was so scandalised that he reported the matter to Pope Innocent IV, who excommunicated all who coined them. The wily merchants, however, circumvented his prohibition by minting similar coins with Christian inscriptions and the year of our Lord, both in Arabic, and with a cross in the centre of the coin. Of this hybrid currency, which began in 1251, there are several specimens. Like Frederick II in Sicily, the later Princes of Antioch and Counts of Tripolis had Saracen guards; and, under the name of Turcoples, given originally to Turks born of Greek mothers, Moslems entered the Christian armies as light cavalry. Of actual Turks there were few, for they had overrun Syria too short a time before the Crusades to take root in Palestine. Like the Franks, and like the Turks in the Balkans, they were only a garrison.

Special interest attaches to the Jews, at this period only a small section of the population, and, as usual, exclusively urban. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Palestine about 1173, found two hundred Jews in the ghetto at Jerusalem beneath the Tower of David, where they had a monopoly of the dyeing trade, and twelve, all dyers, at Bethlehem. The largest Jewish colonies were, as was natural, in the great commercial towns, Tyre and Acre; and the total in the whole of the Latin states was only 7000 to 8000. They could not hold land, and were classed below the Moslems, but practised successfully as doctors and bankers, and had their own judges. Many had come from the south of France. A few Samaritans still survived at Nâbulus, the biblical Shechem, and at Cæsarea.

Below all these freemen came the slaves, including Christians, partly prisoners of war and partly imported. The Assizes of Jerusalem contain special regulations for the slave-trade (largely in Venetian and Genoese hands), but the legislators felt some scruples about allowing a Christian slave to be sold to a Moslem. There was one other very undesirable element in the population—persons who had left their country for their country’s good; for it was not unusual to pardon criminals on condition that they made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and never returned. The Bishop of Acre complains of this practice of making the Holy Land a convict station, just as some of our colonies did in the first half of the last century; and he quotes the Horatian tag, that people, who cross the sea, change the climate, but not their character. Nor does he approve of the tourist, who came from mere curiosity and not from devotion.

Among this heterogeneous mass the smallness of the Frankish forces makes us marvel that the Latin Kingdom lasted for 99 years at Jerusalem and for nearly 200 at Acre. The Assizes[942] inform us that the paper strength of the royal army was only 577 knights and 5025 foot-soldiers, to which we must add the contingents of the two great Military Orders and the Turcoples. At no time, in actual warfare, did the total armed forces of the four Crusading States much exceed 25,000; at Hattin—the Hastings of the Holy Land—Guy de Lusignan had only some 21,000 men under his command; Baldwin I crossed the Euphrates with only 80 knights to take Edessa; and some of the great battles of Tancred were fought by only 200 knights. William of Tyre[943], writing a few years before the catastrophe of 1187, explains the greater success of the Franks in the earlier years of the kingdom by their piety and courage as contrasted with the immorality and diminished martial spirit of his contemporaries. Other causes were the lack of military skill of the Moslems of that generation, and the disunion of their chiefs. When, however, Saladin united Syria and Egypt in his strong hand, the fate of the little Frankish colony was sealed. Disunion of allies neutralised the splendid courage of our Richard I in his attempt to restore what had been lost; Frederick II was a Crusader malgré lui; and in the thirteenth century many Franks, realising that the end was at hand, left for the Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus, or for Armenia, leaving as the most important factors in the Latin population the Italian colonies and the Religious Orders.

The Knights of St John, who originally took their name from St John the Merciful[944], a Cypriote who became Patriarch of Alexandria, arose at the time of the conquest in connection with the hospital, founded at Jerusalem a generation earlier by a citizen of Amalfi. Their first aim was to tend and nourish the sick, then to guard pilgrims up from the coast, and next to fight against the Infidels. They never forgot their original object, and pilgrims were enthusiastic in their praise. Indeed, Saladin is said to have gained admission to their hospital at Acre as a patient to see whether all that he heard about their beneficence was true. Gradually, as the feudal barons found it harder to defend their castles, they handed them to the Knights, who specially chose difficult frontier positions. Margat, Krak des Chevaliers, Chastel-Rouge, Gibelin and Belvoir were their chief fortresses; and Mount Tabor was one of their possessions.

The Templars, founded in 1118 to protect the pilgrims on their way from the coast, enjoyed a less enviable reputation. William of Tyre[945] remarks, that “for a long time they maintained their original object, but subsequently forgot the duty of humility.” They were accused of greed and selfishness, and of being too anxious to stand well with Moslem Princes, with whom they sometimes made a separate peace, to the detriment of Christendom. Thus they warned a Moslem chief of an intended raid by our Prince Edward. Their treachery to the sect of the Assassins scandalised the Court of Jerusalem and immensely damaged Christian interests. The chief of that terrible community, the “Old Man,” as he was called, whose territory was separated from the County of Tripolis by boundary stones, marked on the Christian side with a cross, on that of the Assassins with a knife, had sent an envoy to King Amaury I, offering to embrace Christianity, on condition that the Templars consented to forego the tribute paid to them by the Assassins. All had been arranged, and the diplomatist was on his way home, when the Templars assassinated the Assassin[946].

The Templars’ vow of poverty contrasted ill with their immense wealth, which enabled them, in 1191, to buy Cyprus from Richard I, and to lend a large sum to our Henry III. They acted as bankers; and through their hands passed the money collected in the West for future crusades. They were suspected, too, of heretical opinions, and were accused of initiating their novices with pagan rites. They possessed eighteen fortresses, of which Tortosa was the most important; but the Order did not long survive the loss of the Holy Land, being abolished by Clement V in 1312.

Less important were the Teutonic Knights, the Brüder vom deutschen Hause of Freytag’s well-known historical novel—an off-shoot of the Hospitallers—because the Germans contributed little towards the foundation of the Frankish states, and their distinct Order was not founded till after the first capture of the Latin capital. Their principal sphere of activity was not in Palestine but in Prussia, where they laboured to civilise the barbarous Prussians—a task in which they do not appear to have been altogether successful. A lasting memorial of their activity is the former Prussian fortress of Thorn—a name said to be derived from the castle of Toron in the Holy Land, once their possession. To us a more interesting Order is that of the Hospital of “the Master and Brothers of St Thomas of Canterbury,” at Acre, founded in 1191, in which Edward I showed interest, and which was transferred after the fall of Acre to Cyprus, where it still existed in 1350. A hospital for poor British pilgrims was also founded at Acre in 1254[947].

Palestine was a fruitful land during the Frankish period, although we hear much of the plagues of locusts and field-mice. Contemporary visitors wrote enthusiastically about the gardens of Jericho and the fertile plains of Jezreel and Tripolis, with its vineyards, its olive-yards, and its sugar plantations, whence the cane was taken to the factory at Tyre. The wines of Engaddi were as noted as in the Song of Solomon; and the vintages of Bethlehem and Jerusalem were highly esteemed. Jericho produced grapes so huge that “a man could scarcely lift a bunch of them”—a statement which shows that the vines had not degenerated since the days when the spies of Moses “cut down” from the brook of Eschcol “one cluster of grapes, and bare it between two upon a staff.” Even the silent waters of the Dead Sea were then traversed by fruit barges; and in the so-called “Valley of Moses” to the south of it the olive-trees formed “a dense forest.” There was more wood than now, and consequently more water, but corn had to be imported, for the harvests of Moab, Hebron, Bethlehem (“the house of bread”), and Jericho did not suffice to feed the population. The Sea of Galilee was as full of fish as in the time of Our Lord, and boats plied upon its waters. But, owing to the general insecurity of the open country, few of the cultivators of the soil were Franks; and, where we find Latin peasants, they are usually not far from the shelter of fortified towns. Of manufactures the most important were those of silk at Tripolis, Tiberias, and Tyre, dyeing, and pottery; the glass of Tyre is specially praised by its Archbishop, and the goldsmiths had a street all to themselves at Jerusalem.

Civilisation, so far as comfort was concerned, had reached a high level. Every castle had its baths; and minstrels and dancers appeared at the entertainments of the barons, while we read of theatrical performances at a coronation. A considerable amount of gambling went on in royal circles. Baldwin III was devoted to dice; the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Edessa were so busy with their dice-boxes during a campaign, that they demoralised many of their officers; the Count of Jaffa was so deeply engrossed in a game of dice that he was playing in the street of the Tanners at Jerusalem, that he allowed himself to be assassinated. Hunting with the falcon, and, in Arab fashion, with the cat-like animal known as the carable, were favourite amusements. It seems strange that nothing was done to encourage horse-breeding; and, as the Moslems were loth to sell horses to be used against themselves, the Franks usually imported their steeds from Apulia. Every spring it was the custom of the Frankish chivalry to take their horses to feed on the rich grass at the foot of Mt Carmel; and there, by the brook Kishon, where Elijah slew the prophets of Baal, tournaments were held, in which Saracen chiefs sometimes took part, and after which the combatants refreshed themselves with sherbet, made from the snows of Lebanon.