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The cadi then perceived that the assailants were soldiers of Nicosia, and guessing what was the real state of the case, he gave himself up for lost; and had it not been for the greed of the soldiers, who fell to plundering in the first instance, not a soul would have been left alive.
They were sometimes, though not often, too warm for refreshment. The greens of the trees glittered, the mountains were scarred with purple, and the midday shadows of arcades were sharp as chiseled jet. My first host, Colonel Warren, had his home in Nicosia, a town in the middle of the island, and twenty miles from the sea.
Then the other casks of wine were stowed away in the stone cellar beneath the hall. Leaving his servant a silent, stupid-looking, dark-eyed fellow named Petros to bait the horses, Georgios entered the hall and began to unpack his carpets and embroideries with all the skill of one who had been trained in the bazaars of Cairo, Damascus, or Nicosia.
When I journeyed for any distance by road my equipage was some old landau, drawn by five horses, and accompanied by three servants, one of these being my own, who spoke very fair English, and who had been born on the slopes of Lebanon. It was in this manner that, when I was staying with Sir Henry, I went from Nicosia to Famaugusta, a distance of fifty miles, which it took ten hours to accomplish.
"O lamentable ruins of the ill-fated Nicosia, still moist with the blood of your valorous and unfortunate defenders! Were you capable of feeling, we might jointly bewail our disasters in this solitude, and perhaps find some relief for our sorrows in mutually declaring them.
In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by two of that order, that the State should spend 70,000 ducats for the relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the matter was near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have had a majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished the two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus.
Finally, in the reign of Solyman's successor, Selim II, they were met with effectual resistance through the efforts of the Holy League formed in 1570 by Spain, Venice, and Pope Pius V. Selim in that year captured and pillaged Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus.
At that time, however, the state of Nicosia was very different. As the capital of the Lusignans, the city exhibited the pomp and pride of feudal chivalry, with much of the splendour of oriental courts, and boasted of its palaces, castles, churches, and convents, and chapelries, and gardens, and vineyards, and pleasant places, and all the luxuries likely to render mediæval life enviable.
The mountain ranges are connected by a tract of high ground towards the centre, and separated by two broad plains, towards the east and west. The eastern plain is the more important of the two. It extends along the course of the Pediaeus from Leucosia, or Nicosia, the present capital, to Salamis, a distance of thirty-five miles, and is from five to twelve miles wide.
For it had been learned in that innermost Council, and told no farther than was needful, that Ferdinand of Naples was intriguing to draw Janus into an alliance with a princess of his house; it was also known, by that singular penetration in which Venice had no equal, that the new Archbishop of Nicosia, Alvise Fabrici, was an agent for Ferdinand, secretly working to further his ends in Cyprus; and finally in sign of the willingness of Janus to break faith with Venice, came the rumor of some coldness toward Andrea Cornaro, who had hitherto been his fast friend.
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