The island of Cyprus was conquered from its Byzantine ruler by Richard I of England in 1191 during the Third Crusade, and remained under western rule until the Ottoman conquest of 1570 1. From the 1190s until the 1470s the island was a kingdom governed by the members of the Lusignan family. The Lusignans, who hailed from Poitou in western France, imposed a new European landowning class and a Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy upon the indigenous Greek population. Nevertheless, their regime provided long periods of political stability and, until the late fourteenth century, a considerable...

John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon (d. 1266), was one of the foremost politicians in the kingdom of Jerusalem in the mid-thirteenth century; his family was prominent in the Latin East, and linked by ties of marriage to the royal dynasties of both Jerusalem and Cyprus. John's career and his ancestors' rise to prominence are the subject of the first half of this book. The second concentrates on John's most lasting achievement, his treatise on the pleading, procedures and customs of the High Court of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which includes descriptions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy,...