ABSTRACT
By 1360, and indeed for the previous seventy years, Cyprus was the most easterly outpost of Latin Christendom in the Mediterranean. Except for the crumbling kingdom of Cilician Armenia to the north in what is now part of southern Turkey, all the mainland areas of Anatolia, Syria and North Africa were under Muslim rule. Since the end of the twelfth century the island had been ruled by an elite made up of men of Western European extraction who dominated the far larger population of indigenous Greeks. Language, religious observance and social custom served as a barrier, separating the new rulers from their subjects. In his account of the civil wars on Cyprus in the late 1220s and early 1230s, Philip of Novara allows the Greek population of the island to remain totally invisible. Philip makes it clear that lower down the social scale there was a legal pecking-order determined by religion.
