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PREFACE
When Dr Andreas Pittas of Medochemie approached us to discuss the possibility of a book on the social and cultural history of Cyprus from Richard the Lionheart’s conquest in 1191 to the death of Peter I in 1369, we thought about various options until we realized that his general parameters were more or less perfect for a volume. The only work that approaches the subject somewhat comprehensively is the two-volume history of Frankish and Venetian Cyprus published here in Nicosia in 1995–96 as volumes IV and V of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation’s Istor¤a thw KÊprou, edited by Theodoros Papadopoullos.
Not only is this inaccessible to non-Greek speakers, however, but some of the chapters of this great achievement were composed several years prior to publication, and the explosion of Cypriology over the past ten to fifteen years has made significant changes to the field. The main work in English, volume II of Sir George Hill’s A History of Cyprus (Cambridge 1948), focused on political history and is in any case out of date. Two recent books in English cover well the two areas where source material is both plentiful and spread out over the period in question, Peter Edbury’s The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191–1374 (Cambridge 1991), dealing with political and military matters, and Nicholas Coureas’ The Latin Church in Cyprus 1195–1312 (Aldershot 1997), treating the internal affairs of the Latin secular and regular clergy (soon to be accompanied by a second volume treating the period down to 1378).
Thus what is needed is a new synthesis, in English, of the social and cultural history of the island in this period. Since the topic of this book is so broad, and the source material is so varied, we decided that it would be impossible to do the job alone. Having fixed upon a structure, we enlisted the collaboration of four internationally recognized experts on various aspects of Frankish Cyprus. Peter Edbury’s knowledge of the Frankish nobility of Cyprus is unparallelled, so he was the obvious choice to write on the Franks. Few people are equipped to deal with both Byzantine and Western art on Cyprus, the subject of Annemarie Weyl Carr’s chapter.
Gilles Grivaud and Nicholas Coureas are among the most prolific authors on Frankish Cyprus, having touched on a variety of themes. Since Grivaud composed a mammouth 345-page ‘chapter’ on the intellectual life of Cyprus in 1191–1571 for the Istor¤a thw KÊprou, we asked him to draft an updated and abbreviated version for our period, which we have translated into English. Over the past decade Coureas has penned a great number of studies concerning commercial aspects of Frankish Cyprus, so the task of treating the island’s economy fell to him.
The remaining subjects—the Greeks and religion—we claimed for ourselves, although we had some pertinent background. Initially we planned to direct the book at a broad, popular audience, so for example it was to include just a few endnotes. The preliminary results were so encouraging, however, that we reached the conclusion that the volume could also satisfy the needs of the scholarly community at the same time. Accordingly, we gave new instructions to the contributors and contacted Julian Deahl at Brill, who was enthusiastic. The editors of Brill’s The Medieval Mediterranean series, the ideal place for this book, approved the proposal. Since all six authors are experts on Frankish Cyprus, to ensure the highest standards each author read every other chapter and gave written comments, sometimes extensive, to the other contributors, as did an anonymous reader for Brill. We wish to thank our collaborators for their own chapters and for their assistance with the other chapters.
Working with Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder at Brill has been a great pleasure. We also express our gratitude to Brill’s reader, to the series editors (especially Benjamin Arbel, who gave comments) for accepting the book, and to William O. Duba for providing computer, historical, and linguistic advice in the later stages. Our colleagues in the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Cyprus have, as always, been very supportive. Above all, the people at Medochemie, led by Dr Andreas Pittas, without whose enthusiasm, generosity, and patience with inevitable delays this book would not exist in any form, deserve our warmest thanks. A.N.-K. and C.D.S. University of Cyprus Nicosia, April 2005
SPONSOR’S PREFACE
The idea for this book was conceived in early 2002 during a visit to Cyprus of my late friend Johnny Stuart, the Scottish icon specialist, and Olga Popova, the vivacious sexagenarian Russian professor of Byzantine art. Johnny, an Orthodox Christian (in fact one of the very few Orthodox Scotsmen) gifted with an unparallelled charisma for languages, exhibited the enthusiasm of a child, with an eye ‘specially’ made to spot Byzantine masterpieces on wood or painted ‘al fresco’.
It was the first visit to the island for Olga, who has always been equally enthusiastic irrespective of personal pain, health problems, restrictive budgets, or adverse climatic conditions, dedicating her entire soul to Byzantine art and at the same time constituting the Byzantine ‘snob’ par excellence: ‘Icon painting, dear Andreas, and I mean the real icon painting, stopped in 1453’, with the fall of the City. Basta. Conversing in English with Johnny and in German with Olga (the two of them in Russian), we set out on a week of explorations/excursions to the painted and other magnificent churches and monasteries of, mainly, the mountainous parts of Cyprus. The result: enthusiasm, love, and genuine feelings of excitement when we discovered each new thirteenth-century icon—and all this in a landscape truly medieval, Byzantine in places, attractive and slightly chilly, but enormously seductive and provocative.
What was the reality then? How was Cyprus? Were these tough times, or ‘Dark Ages’, as they say? Were the people suppressed and poor? And what languages were spoken around Nicosia or Limassol? Were the Churches really at loggerheads, and if so, why? Most of these questions addressed to me went unanswered. My knowledge was limited to the tantalizing stories of Leontios Makhairas, the man who both spurred my interest in and directed my intellect toward this great time. As soon as my friends departed, I contacted the Western medievalist at the University of Cyprus, Chris Schabel. Schabel immediately connected me with a visiting professor at the university, Angel Nicolaou-Konnari, the young scholar who has written an exciting thesis about the ethnic mix of the time, a thesis reading like a fairy tale.
The three of us sat down together and came up with the plan for this book. My thanks go to Angel and Chris and the team of distinguished scholars they put together who contributed to the book: Annemarie Weyl Carr, Nicholas Coureas, Peter W. Edbury, and Gilles Grivaud. I find it superb that Brill has decided to publish it. Somehow, Johnny and Olga are a part of it. Ultimately they have been the stimulus to reminisce and think about these bygone times. Dr Andreas Pittas Limassol, 24 December 2004
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Annemarie Weyl Carr (Southern Methodist University) specializes in Byzantine and Crusader art. Her work on Cyprus has centered on manuscript, mural, and icon painting and its contexts of use. Aside from her many articles on medieval Cyprus, some of which have now been reprinted in Cyprus and the Devotional Arts of Byzantium in the Era of the Crusades (Aldershot 2005), she has published Byzantine Illumination 1150–1250 (Chicago 1987) and (with L.J. Morrocco) A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered, the Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus (Austin 1991).
Nicholas Coureas (Cyprus Research Centre) works on all aspects of the history of Frankish Cyprus, especially ecclesiastical and economic history. Besides his The Latin Church in Cyprus, 1195–1312 (Aldershot 1997), the sequel to which he is currently writing, he has published many articles on Lusignan Cyprus, co-edited (with J. RileySmith) Cyprus and the Crusades (Nicosia 1995) and (with C. Schabel) The Cartulary of the Cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia (Nicosia 1997), and translated several volumes of source material, all noted in the bibliography.
Peter W. Edbury (Cardiff University) is a specialist on the history of the Crusader Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus, notably with his The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191–1374 (Cambridge 1991; Greek translation 2003) and his critical edition of John of Ibelin, The Livre des Assises (Brill 2003). He has published widely in the history and historiography of the Latin East in general, including (with J.G. Rowe) William of Tyre, Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge 1988), John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Woodbridge 1997), and texts in translation.
Gilles Grivaud (University of Rouen, formerly of the French School at Athens) focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. He has published numerous volumes and articles on all aspects of the history of early Frankish Cyprus, as noted in the bibliography, but also on later periods, such as Excerpta Cypria Nova: Voyageurs occidentaux à Chypre au XVème siècle (Nicosia 1990) and Villages désertés à Chypre ( fin XIIe –fin XIXe siècle) (Nicosia 1998).
Angel Nicolaou-Konnari (University of Cyprus) studies Hellenism under Latin rule. She is co-editor (with Michalis Pieris) of the diplomatic edition of the Chronicle of Leontios Makhairas (Nicosia 2003), editor of the historical treatise of Giorgio de Nores (Nicosia 2006), and she is currently revising for publication her PhD thesis, The Encounter of Greeks and Franks in Cyprus in the Late Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Phenomena of Acculturation and Ethnic Awareness. Chris Schabel (University of Cyprus) specializes in medieval intellectual history and the ecclesiastical history of the Latin East. Besides the studies noted in the bibliography, he has written Theology at Paris 1316–1345 (Aldershot 2000).
INTRODUCTION
This volume is concerned with the cultural and social history of Cyprus from 1191 to 1374 when a French-speaking aristocracy ruled a largely Greek-speaking population. The political and military history of Frankish Cyprus, especially up until 1374, has been well served since the mid-nineteenth century, when Count Louis de Mas Latrie produced three volumes of narrative and sources in 1852–61.
By the end of the century he and his son René de Mas Latrie had published editions of the main chronicles in Western languages and much of the documentary evidence, and Constantine Sathas had done the same for the main Greek sources. With the publication of much of the papal registers and other pertinent documents by the mid-twentieth century, Sir George Hill was able to treat the topic rather exhaustively in volumes two and three of his four-volume A History of Cyprus published in 1940–52. By 1991 other scholars, most notably Jean Richard, had more or less completed the foundations on which Peter W. Edbury constructed his new narrative, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191–1374, which is unlikely to require a replacement in the foreseeable future.
The outlines of the political history of later-medieval Cyprus are, therefore, well known. In 1191 Isaac Comnenos was ruling Cyprus as self-proclaimed emperor, having usurped authority from Byzantium. On his way to Syria during the Third Crusade, King Richard the Lionheart of England defeated Isaac and conquered the island in May. Richard’s forces held the island in the early summer of 1191, and then, after a brief uprising, he sold Cyprus to the Knights Templar, who promptly returned it to him in May of 1192 following a more serious revolt.
Richard then sold the island to a Frenchman from Poitou, Guy of Lusignan, who had been king of Jerusalem by marriage. Guy began installing a feudal system on Western models, but in a purer form. After his death, his brother Aimery began negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, for the creation of the Kingdom of Cyprus, and with Pope Celestine III for the establishment of a Latin ecclesiastical hierarchy on the island. Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim crowned Aimery in 1197, and ‘officially’ Cyprus remained a client kingdom of the German Emperor until 1247, when Pope Innocent IV, in the context of the long struggle between Papacy and Empire, formally dissolved the political ties between Cyprus and Henry VI’s son, Frederick II. Thus in 1247 the actual independence of Cyprus, except for the period of the Civil War, was made legal. Cyprus retained this status until 1374, when after a punitive expedition the Genoese annexed Famagusta and the surrounding area. With that the period of complete independence came to an end.
King James II was able to end the island’s de facto partition in 1464, but only with the help of the Mamluks, to whom Cyprus had been paying tribute since the Egyptian forces invaded the island and captured King Janus in the mid-1420s. Gradually the Venetians came to control the much-weakened state of Cyprus. This arrangement was made official in 1489 when Venice relieved Queen Catherine Cornaro of her nominal control, although the last Lusignan king had died in 1474. The Venetians continued to rule Cyprus until the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1570–71.
The period before 1374 represents not only an era of political independence but also of peace and rising prosperity for Cyprus. Only two serious internal disturbances interrupted this peace. First, the dissolution of the bonds with the Holy Roman Empire did not occur without a struggle. Frederick II himself came to Cyprus in 1228 and tried to make good on his claims during the regency of Alice of Champagne, setting off the lengthy Civil War lasting until 1233, described in fascinating detail by one of the participants, Philip of Novara, in The Wars of Frederick II against the Ibelins in Syria and Cyprus. Then in 1306 Amaury of Lusignan usurped authority from his brother, King Henry II, ruling as governor until his assassination in 1310 and Henry’s return.
To these two troublesome events we may add the Black Death of 1348, which hit Cyprus as hard as it did most other areas of Europe and the Mediterranean. Otherwise we can conveniently divide the period from 1191 and 1374 into two phases, before and after 1291 when Acre (the present Akko in Israel) and the other remaining crusader cities in SyriaPalestine fell to the Muslims. The first phase is marked by close political ties with the Crusader States and military activity on the mainland, with Cyprus taking on the supporting role that King Richard probably envisioned when he captured the island.
Cyprus had an important part in the Fifth Crusade of 1217–21 and, especially, in the first crusade of King Louis IX of France, which began in 1248, both of which focused on Egypt. Moreover, at various times the kings of Cyprus also claimed the throne of Jerusalem, their claim becoming permanent in the 1260s. The fall of Acre in 1291 ushered in a new era for Cyprus. The kingdom was now the front line against the Muslims, but resources could be kept at home rather than expended on the mainland. In addition, although refugees from Syria and Palestine had been coming to Cyprus since 1191, they came in waves in the last decades of the Crusader States and in a great flood in 1291. Many of these new settlers were nobles or bourgeois, and after an initial period of crisis, they showed themselves to be a benefit to the island, especially economically.
Moreover, when the pope imposed an embargo on trade with the Muslims, Cyprus profited immensely as a middleman in the commerce between the Islamic and Christian worlds. The relocation to Cyprus of the headquarters of the main military orders, the Templars and Hospitallers, did cause tension with the crown and led in part to Amaury’s usurpation, but this temporary instability ended around 1310 with Amaury’s death, the removal of the Hospitallers to Rhodes, and the trial and suppression of the Templars. Thus despite worries about the Muslim threat and even about designs on Cyprus by other Western powers, such as the Aragonese and Angevin rulers of Sicily and Naples, the period before the relaxation and, in 1344, complete lapse of the papal ban on trade with the Muslims was to be the zenith for medieval Cyprus. Afterwards Cyprus experienced a gradual decline as an entrepôt in the East-West trade, a decline exacerbated by the Black Death.
It was probably in part to reverse this trend that the romantic King Peter I (1359–69) led the last great victorious crusade in 1365, taking and sacking Cyprus’ main commercial rival, Alexandria. The dramatic events of the following decade left a profound imprint on the final two centuries of Latin rule. Peter’s behaviour became erratic, and in 1369 he was murdered. Perhaps because of the disruption of Genoese (and Venetian) trading interests in the area that resulted from the sack of Alexandria, the Genoese invaded Cyprus a few years later.
The immediate cause of the invasion stemmed from the latest in a series of incidents involving Genoa or Genoese citizens. Genoa nearly went to war with Cyprus in 1343–44 and 1364–65. In October 1372 violence broke out between Venetians and Genoese after the coronation of Peter II (1369–82) as king of Jerusalem in Famagusta. During the chaos, in which Cypriots took the Venetians’ side, Genoese property was destroyed and lives were lost, but since Peter blamed the Genoese for the incident, they received no redress. From there things escalated rapidly: the Genoese invaded, the war dragged on to the detriment of Cyprus, and the negotiated settlement was harsh for the Cypriots, who agreed to pay a huge indemnity in installments, offer many important hostages to Genoa, and cede Famagusta to Genoa as further security for payment. Cyprus was de facto partitioned in 1374, exactly 600 years before the most recent invasion and partition. The war with Genoa did not destroy the island, but it had a profound effect on all aspects of Cypriot society.
Thus not only did 1374 provide the terminus for Edbury’s book, but it marks a natural break for the present volume as well. But whereas it was possible for one person to master the political and military history of Cyprus in 1191– 1374, the nature of the topic, source material, and secondary bibliography makes it unlikely that a single scholar could provide a solid synthesis for the history of Cypriot society and culture in these years. Although narrative political history is returning to popularity, social history broadly construed has a much more important place in scholarship than it did a half century ago. Indeed for a while it seemed as if social history would practically eclipse all other forms. At the same time, with globalization and the increasing diversification of Europe and North America, the academic focus on multicultural societies has increased dramatically. In the context of medieval history, this often means an emphasis on areas on the borders between cultures. In a certain sense, at a time when language changed over short distances, long-distance travel was limited to a small section of the population, and mass media were confined to religious and political decrees, all areas were borders between cultures. In Western Europe, moreover, wherever Jews dwelt society was ipso facto multicultural.
Nevertheless, it is the places where radical differences existed that attract our attention most of all. In the specific period with which this book deals, this means above all Spain, Ireland, Eastern Europe, Sicily and Southern Italy, the Crusader States, Latin Greece, and Cyprus. What groups lived in early Frankish Cyprus? What was their function in society? How did they identify and express themselves? How did they view others? How did these groups interact? These are some of the questions this volume attempts to answer. Approaching all of these issues requires training and experience that no one author is likely to have. Beyond the basic undergraduate and postgraduate education of a medievalist, this synthesis demands close familiarity with topics as disparate as feudal law and the Filioque, icon production and import duties, public notaries and passion plays.
The result is that a synthesis of this sort has to be a collaboration. Until now the only such work that approaches the present book constitutes volumes IV and V of the History of Cyprus edited by Theodoros Papadopoullos. This work, however, is only available in Modern Greek, treats the entire period from 1191 to 1571, deals with political history as well, and is already a decade old. A further obstacle to such a synthesis is the nature of the source material. Whereas the narrative of the political history of Cyprus in these years can be pieced together with the major chronicles, using the more fragmentary documentary sources to supplement, explain, verify, or nuance the story, with social history it is the fragmentary sources that often lead the way. Of course, we do not speak only of written sources, but of archaeological finds, works of art, pieces of parchment, etc.
Just gathering these sources together is a huge task. Moreover, much of the written material is still in manuscript form, and it goes without saying that the scholar has to deal with Byzantine Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and other languages without benefit of translation. To the disparate nature of the source material we add the equally disparate—and more massive—secondary bibliography as a hindrance to a synthetic work on the society of Cyprus in these years. While Edbury’s secondary bibliography contains some 300 entries, no small number, even our restricted bibliography for social history contains twice as many lemmata. It is at this point that we must acknowledge our debt to the pioneering studies of scholars dealing with particular aspects of the social and cultural history of early Frankish Cyprus. The work of Camille Enlart in art and John Hackett in religion around 1900 are splendid examples of what could be achieved in cultural history with the sources then available. Since then, however, much more has come to light.
Jean Richard, whom we have already mentioned, figures in every chapter in this volume; besides his many studies, he has provided a great deal of new source material from the Vatican over the past half century. In the last couple of decades Michel Balard has led a group of scholars—Balletto, Lombardo, Otten-Froux, Pavoni, Polonio—publishing many volumes of notarial sources from the Genoese and Venetian archives, while the prosopographical information that Count Wilpert H. Rudt de Collenberg provided in his many articles has proven valuable. The patchwork of Greek sources has become clearer through the efforts of Spyridon Lampros, R.M. Dawkins, Constantine Chatzipsaltes, I.P. Tsiknopoullos, Jean Darrouzès, Peter Schreiner, Costas Constantinides, and others. Rupert Gunnis, George Jeffery, A.H.S. Megaw, Doula Mouriki, David Metcalf, Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzis, Athanasios Papageorghiou, and Andreas and Judith Stylianou, not to mention the current staff of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, are among those who have been instrumental in making the physical remains of the Frankish period—castles, churches, icons, paintings, coins, seals, pottery—more accessible and understandable.
One must not forget the many contributions of Theodoros Papadopoullos, Costas P. Kyrris, Benediktos Englezakis, Benjamin Arbel, David Jacoby, and Anthony Luttrell, besides the legion of younger scholars too numerous to mention. Finally, the journals and publications of the Cyprus Research Centre, the Society for Cypriot Studies, the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation, the Cypriot Society for Historical Studies, and the monasteries of Kykkos and Neophytos have greatly enriched the field. It is to these scholars and institutions that we owe this volume, for if the general political narrative can be constructed with sources largely available before 1950, the social history of early Frankish Cyprus depends mostly on what has been published since then. This book is divided into six chapters with one-word titles, on Greeks, Franks, Economy, Religion, Literature, and Art.
The decision to begin with the Greeks was a democratic and therefore modern one: they represent the vast majority of the population in this period. On medieval criteria the Franks might have come first, since they included the aristocracy that held power. The other groups were less numerous than the Greeks and less powerful than the Franks, and for information on Syrians, Armenians, and other minorities, the reader is directed to the chapters on the economy and religion, and to a lesser extent on the Greeks and art. Naturally the four thematic chapters on economy, religion, literature, and art focus on the contributions of the Greeks and Franks. The opening chapter on the Greeks explores the nature and extent of the social and demographic changes that the takeover of the Lusignan regime meant for the majority of the population and their identities. Although their rule was established by conquest, the social system that the Lusignans introduced was not one of colonial exploitation from the outside, nor did it cause a sharp discontinuity with the past.
Based on the medieval belief in social inequality, which assured the optimum economic and social advantages for the Frankish ruling class, the system nevertheless created conditions of peaceful cohabitation that avoided ethnic conflicts and allowed social mobility for the Greeks. Thence, a long-lasting pattern of social discourse between the two groups began in the thirteenth century. The enforcement of a strictly stratified system based on a legal system that defined ethnic and social differentiation in terms of religion offset the demographic superiority of the Greeks and fixed the social and ethnic boundaries, yet the Greek urban population was able to penetrate this social frontier through their economic and professional development.
While the situation for unfree Greek peasants largely remained as it was under the Byzantines, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries members of free Greek families could follow careers as ecclesiastical dignitaries, notaries, and scribes and/or as officials in royal and seigneurial administration. They gradually acquired the necessary social and economic importance for the formation of a new kind of Greek aristocracy, allowing some of them to climb the ranks of the Frankish nobility in the fifteenth century. They thus assumed the role of an intermediary group between the Frankish aristocracy and burgesses, on the one hand, and the Greek lower classes, on the other, which facilitated cultural exchanges.
Following the initial destruction of the Greek nobles—the archontes—the lower strata cooperated with the Frankish rulers as a means of survival. This, together with the fair administration of the Lusignans, helps explain both the absence of uprisings against the regime throughout the Frankish period and the formation of the identity of the Kypriotis. The second chapter traces the origins and activities of the Frankish ruling class. Throughout the period of Lusignan rule in Cyprus (1191– 1489) the Frankish settlers and their descendants never comprised more than a small minority of the population. These settlers were people of Western European extraction, distinguishable from the rest of the inhabitants as Latin-rite Christians, accepting the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope.
The Lusignan kings of Cyprus, who established themselves after the conquest of the island during the Third Crusade, came originally from western France, but the knights, clerics, and townsmen who made up the Frankish community were of diverse backgrounds. Like any ruling elite they exploited the subject population for their own advantage, but as it was in their interest to ensure peace and stability, the population as a whole was able to benefit from the long periods of prosperity their rule entailed. The Lusignan regime exhibited many of the trappings of Western European kingship, but behind this façade much of the routine of government and much of the law as it affected the non-Frankish population harked back to Byzantine times. The monarchy proved durable with no damaging succession crises until the second half of the fifteenth century. Eventually the legitimate branch of the dynasty faded out, and it was this failure of heirs that ushered in the period of Venetian rule (1489–1571). The nobility, at least until the end of the fourteenth century, was reasonably homogeneous, dominated by a comparatively small number of knightly families. The nobles provided the kings with advisers and military commanders, but, as no nobleman possessed a fortress of any consequence, they were rarely able to challenge royal authority. Some nobles were extremely wealthy, famous for their enthusiasm for hunting. Although Cyprus’ role in the international carrying trade has received the most attention from historians, the chapter on the economy shows that under the Lusignans it retained its agricultural base, while becoming more export oriented and diversified—in both agriculture and manufacturing. Salt, sugar, and cotton in particular constituted important additions to the traditional production of wheat, barley, wine, and oil. Nevertheless, from the late thirteenth century to the mid-fourteenth century Cyprus was important in commerce between the Near East and Western Europe. The Mamluk conquest of Latin possessions in the coastal areas of Syria and Palestine between 1265 and 1291 and the consequent migration to Cyprus of Latins and Syrians were preconditions for Cyprus’ participation in this trade. The pope responded to these losses in 1292 with an embargo on visits by Latin merchants to Muslim lands, and as a result merchants from Western Europe frequented Cyprus to obtain spices and other luxuries, as well as to sell textiles, timber, and iron. The immigrants contributed to urban life, not only in Famagusta, the main beneficiary of the above developments, but also in Nicosia and Limassol. The former became a centre for moneylending, while Limassol played a significant role in the export of Cypriot agricultural products. With royal encouragement Famagusta developed institutionally as well as commercially, becoming to some extent a replica of the lost Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem on Cypriot soil and welcoming merchants from smaller trading nations, such as Ragusans and Anconitans, along with the Venetians, Genoese, Pisans, Florentines, Provençals and Catalans. Long-distance trade between Cyprus and Western Europe coexisted with short to medium-distance trade, often run by Greeks, with Cilician Armenia, Hospitaller Rhodes, Venetian Crete and Euboea, and the Genoese colonies of Chios and Pera. Notwithstanding the decline of Cyprus’ importance in the international carrying trade following the relaxation of the papal embargo in 1344, Cyprus continued to play an active part in international trade on account of the demand for its agricultural products, especially sugar, and for its salt and camlets. Most historians have viewed the history of religion in Cyprus between 1191 and 1374 as a clash, or even war, between Latins and Greeks. The chapter on religion argues that the spiritual history of the island in these years was more colourful, more multicultural, and more complex, especially in cosmopolitan Nicosia and the emporium of Famagusta.
Rather the period is characterized both by the jurisdictional dominance of the Latin clergy over the other, subordinate, Christian groups, and by peaceful coexistence, considerable toleration, and a degree of autonomy for non-Latin Christians and nonChristians. Despite some seizures of property and the installation of a Latin Church hierarchy in 1196, for the first three decades of Frankish rule Greeks and other rites were mostly left alone. In 1220 the Latin Church and Frankish aristocracy began to take steps to control and subordinate the clergy of the other groups, but for the most part the Westerners simply applied in Cyprus the same policy that was followed in the West and elsewhere in the Latin East. Indeed the non-Latin clergy enjoyed a more favourable position in Cyprus than elsewhere under Latin rule, while the non-Latin laity was not directly affected by the subordination of their clerics.
This was, however, small consolation for the Greek and Syrian clergy, and the next four decades are characterized by the resistance, exile, protest, and even martyrdom of Greek priests and monks. Still, many of the Greek and Syrian clergy were willing to cooperate with the Latins and accepted the new status quo, and by 1260 this group had requested and received a permanent constitution, the Bulla Cypria, which was to regulate ecclesiastical affairs for the remainder of the Frankish period. Some Greeks and Syrians continued to resist the Latins and struggled with their co-religious who accepted the Bulla Cypria, but by 1300 they resolved to live with the new situation. In the fourteenth century the various Christian rites found that they had much in common, for example worshipping at the same shrines, participating in the same processions, and even intermarrying.
Of course, there were internal tensions in the Latin regular and secular clergy, between Church and State, and among the Greek clerics, but monks and priests generally enjoyed a period of flourishing. The history of the written culture of the Kingdom of Cyprus, the focus of chapter five, has received much less attention from specialists than the political and institutional history of the island; indeed the first works devoted to this subject only began to appear in the 1980s. Thus it constitutes a relatively new field of research, still lacking some of the tools that are indispensable for a systematic study of the material (catalogues of French or Latin manuscripts, for example), and requiring an examination of religious writings for a more complete understanding. Moreover, because of the emphasis placed on studies of political history, the secular written culture is often viewed from one-sided perspectives (Franks/Greeks), which deprive literature of its internal dynamism and minimize the spectrum of exchanges between the different systems of thought. In fact, the research has thus far shown that the Lusignan kingdom was very receptive to intellectual and spiritual trends that began both in the Latin West and in Byzantium—and even in the Arabic East, whether Muslim or Christian. In the intellectual realm the resulting situation is quite close to what art historians have observed.
The final chapter, on visual art, endeavors to weave together the histories of both the Latin and the Orthodox artistic production of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and to find a coherent narrative in the two stories. Few fields can have seen so dramatic an expansion in the number of newly published monuments as medieval Cyprus has in the past decade. This rich volume of material needs to be integrated not so much into a history of Byzantine art on Cyprus, or of Crusader art, or even of an encounter of Orthodox and Crusader traditions, but rather of artistic production and consumption on Cyprus as a coherent social whole, with its distinctive geographic, social, residential, and intellectual patterns. The chapter inventories the artifacts that have been gathered, reviews current scholarly approaches to them, and proposes a broad historical shape in which to place them. This shape retains the traditional two phases, a thirteenth- and a fourteenth-century one. It distinguishes these phases less by a changing relation of Greek to Latin on the island, which is intermingled throughout, than by a shift in the artistic traditions upon which both draw.
The thirteenth century is dominated by norms formulated on the Syro-Palestinian mainland. Already in the early decades of the century, beneath the lingering afterglow of Comnenian hegemony in the monumental cycles of 1190–1220, Cypriot icon painting reflects Syro-Palestinian conventions, and it is the Syro-Palestinian mainland in all its cultural complexity that dominates the work of Cypriot and immigrant Latin patrons alike in most media when artistic production escalates once again on Cyprus in the late thirteenth century. The fourteenth century, by contrast, is dominated by the impact of the high styles of Byzantium and the Gothic West.
Though regional Cypriot traditions emerge in fourteenth-century painting, prominent Cypriot patrons—both Greek and Latin—turn to the high styles of the contemporary international courts. Both alike define their status by the courtliness of their art, not by its religious origin, thus opening the way to dramatic combinations of Gothic and Palaeologan. Facilitated by this meeting of articulate traditions, Cyprus reenters the international discourse of dominant styles, its regionalism giving way to what is recognized as Byzantine in painting, its architecture shaped by Gothic ashlar structures. Durable traditions then grow from the internalization of these international conventions, some initially Latin like the architectural sculpture of Cyprus, some inherently Greek—it is at this point that the icon of Kykkos assumes its distinctive form—and others, like the vita icon or the funerary icon, inherently hybrid.
Taken as a whole, these chapters show that the sharp dividing lines between ethnic and social groups that existed in 1192 became blurred over time, whether we look at art, literature, religion, economics, or ethnicity itself. Rather than clear categories and convenient boxes in which we can place people of different nationalities, what we have is a more confused spectrum, with individual people and works of art and literature sometimes fitting into a specific niche—say a Greek Orthodox peasant in the Troodos Mountains—and sometimes crossing supposedly impermeable boundaries—for example the splendid Gothic and Byzantine cathedral of St George of the Greeks in Famagusta. It is in the stunning richness of its blended multiplicity that Cypriot society in 1191–1374 captivates our attention.
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