y
to her unknown bridegroom as very pressing; she accepted the invitation,
and on the second day Godfrey's friends suggested to him that he ought
not to let slip so fine a chance to secure a beautiful wife. His
decision was at once made. He presented himself as suitor to the
princess, and succeeded in convincing her that it would be much better
for her to marry him, whom she had seen and knew, than a man of whom she
knew nothing, who might be crooked, or lame, or otherwise unworthy of
her. She consented to be married at once. Her train of attendants
returned pleased to Constantinople, bearing the tidings to the emperor,
her father, whose rage on receiving this intelligence may be imagined.
There was, however, but one thing to be done--he must bear it with the
best grace he could. The parties met afterward at Larissa. Godfrey
resigned his crown to his father-in-law, received it back again as a
fief from him, and was required to accept the assizes of Jerusalem as
the law by which he should govern it.

This system of law differs from others in this important respect, that
the highest nobility and bravest heroes of the Christian Orient were the
most zealous and successful jurists. We cannot give them a special
notice. The most distinguished was John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa,
Ascalon, and Rama, born about the year 1200. His attempts to restore the
lost _Lettres du Sepulcre_ has succeeded so well that his work has,
until recently, been regarded as identical with those lost books, and
even _now_, when the laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem are spoken of, the
work of John of Ibelin is generally understood to be meant. It was this
very book which the barons of the kingdom of Cyprus, in 1368, when Peter
I, by his arbitrary rule, had subverted justice, set up in a solemn
assembly as the code of the kingdom. In order to make it as like as
possible to the _Lettres du Sepulcre_, it was sealed in the same manner,
placed in a closed chest, and kept in the cathedral of Nicosia, and this
chest was not allowed to be opened except in the presence of the king
and four vassals.

When in the year 1489 the republic of Venice obtained, through Catharine
Cornaro, possession of the isle of Cyprus, the republic bound itself by
a solemn act to observe these assizes. The copy which had been preserved
at Nicosia was subsequently lost by some unknown event, and when in the
mean time the French language had ceased to be the prevailing one, there
was a