return to Guy, but went to Henry of Champagne, who married the widowed Isabella. Guy found some satisfaction for his loss in buying from the Templars the island of Cyprus, and there he reigned for the last two years of his life (1192–1194). He is judged harshly by contemporary writers, as simplex and insufficiens; but Dodu (in his Histoire des institutions du royaume de Jérusalem) suggests that Guy was depreciated because the kingdom had been lost in his reign, in much the same way as Godfrey of Bouillon was exalted because Jerusalem had just been won at his accession. Guy was a brave if not a particularly able knight; and his instant attack on Acre after his release by Saladin shows that he had the sentiment de ses devoirs.
He was succeeded in Cyprus by his brother Amalric, who acquired the title of king of Cyprus from the emperor Henry VI., and became king of Jerusalem in 1197 by his marriage to Isabella, after the death of Henry of Champagne (see Amalric II.). Amalric was the founder of a dynasty of kings of Cyprus, which lasted till 1475, while after 1269 his descendants regularly enjoyed the title of kings of Jerusalem. The scions of the house of Lusignan proved themselves the most sincere of crusaders. They possessed in Cyprus a kingdom, in which they had vindicated for themselves a stronger hold over their feudatories than the kings of Jerusalem had ever enjoyed, and in which trading centres like Famagusta flourished vigorously; and they used the resources of their kingdom, in conjunction with the Hospitallers of Rhodes, to check the progress of the Mahommedans.
Among the most famous members of the house who ruled in Cyprus three may be mentioned. The first is Hugh III. (the Great), who was king from 1267 to 1285: to him, apparently, St Thomas dedicated his De Regimine Principum; and it is in his reign that the kingdom of Jerusalem becomes permanently connected with that of Cyprus. The second is Hugh IV. (1324–1359), to whom Boccaccio dedicated one of his works, and who set on foot an alliance with the pope, Venice and the Hospitallers, which resulted in the capture of Smyrna (1344). The last is Peter I., Hugh’s second son and successor, who reigned from 1359 to 1369, when he was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy of the barons. Peter and his chancellor de Mezières represent the last flicker of the crusading spirit (see Crusades).
Before the extinction of the line in 1475, it had succeeded in putting a branch on the throne of Armenia. Five short-lived kings of the house ruled in Armenia after 1342, “Latin exiles,” as Stubbs says, “in the midst of several strange populations all alike hostile.” The kingdom of Armenia fell before the sultan of Egypt, who took prisoner its last king Leo V. in 1375, though the kings of Cyprus afterwards continued to bear the title; the kingdom of Cyprus itself continued to exist under the house of Lusignan for 100 years longer. The mother of the last king, James III. (who died when he was two years old), was a Venetian lady, Catarina Cornaro. She had been made a daughter of the republic at the time of her marriage to the king of Cyprus; and on the death of her child the republic first acted as guardian for its daughter, and then, in 1489, obtained from her the cession of the island.
See J. M. J. L. de Mas-Latrie, Histoire de l’île de Chypre sous les princes de la maison de Lusignan (Paris, 1852–1853); W. Stubbs, Lectures on Medieval and Modern History (3rd ed., Oxford, 1900).
LUSSIN, a small island in the Adriatic Sea, in the Gulf of
Quarnero, forming together with the adjacent islands of Veglia
and Cherso an administrative district in the Austrian crownland
of Istria. Pop. (1900) 11,615. The island is 24 m. in length,
is of an average breadth of 1.64 m., being little more than 300 yds.
wide at its narrowest point, and has an area of 29 sq. m. The
chief town and principal harbour is Lussinpiccolo (pop. 7207),
which is the most important trading centre in the Quarnero
group. The town has become a favourite winter resort, its
climate resembling that of Nice. To the south-east of it is
Lussingrande (pop. 2349), with an old Venetian palace and a
shipbuilding wharf. The island was first peopled at the end of
the 14th century. Its inhabitants are renowned seamen.
LUSTRATION, a term that includes all the methods of purification and expiation among the Greeks and Romans. Among
the Greeks there are two ideas clearly distinguishable—that
human nature must purify itself (κάθαρσις) from guilt before
it is fit to enter into communion with God or even to associate
with men, and that guilt must be expiated voluntarily (ἱλασμός)
by certain processes which God has revealed, in order to avoid
the punishment that must otherwise overtake it. It is not
possible to make such a distinction among the Latin terms
lustratio, piacula, piamenta, caerimoniae, and even among the
Greeks it is not consistently observed. Guilt and impurity
arose in various ways; among the Greeks, besides the general
idea that man is always in need of purification, the species of
guilt most insisted on by religion are incurred by murder, by
touching a dead body, by sexual intercourse, and by seeing a
prodigy or sign of the divine will. The last three spring from
the idea that man had been without preparation and improperly
brought into communication with God, and was therefore guilty.
The first, which involves a really moral idea of guilt, is far more
important than the others in Hellenic religion. Among the
Romans we hear more of the last species of impurity; in general
the idea takes the form that after some great disaster the people
become convinced that guilt has been incurred and must be
expiated. The methods of purification consist in ceremonies
performed with water, fire, air or earth, or with a branch of a
sacred tree, especially of the laurel, and also in sacrifice and
other ceremonial. Before entering a temple the worshipper
dipped his hand in the vase of holy water (περιῤῥανήριον, aqua
lustralis) which stood at the door; before a sacrifice bathing
was common; salt-water was more efficacious than fresh, and
the celebrants of the Eleusinian mysteries bathed in the sea
(ἄλαδε, μύσται); the water was more efficacious if a firebrand
from the altar were plunged in it. The torch, fire and sulphur
(τὸ θεῖον) were also powerful purifying agents. Purification by
air was most frequent in the Dionysiac mysteries; puppets
suspended and swinging in the air (oscilla) formed one way of
using the lustrative power of the air. Rubbing with sand and
salt was another method. The sacrifice chiefly used for purification
by the Greeks was a pig; among the Romans it was always,
except in the Lupercalia, a pig, a sheep and a bull (suovetaurilia).
In Athens a purificatory sacrifice and prayer was held before
every meeting of the ecclesia; the Maimacteria,[1] in honour of
Zeus Maimactes (the god of wrath), was an annual festival of
purification, and at the Thargelia two men (or a woman and a
man) were sacrificed on the seashore, their bodies burned and
the ashes thrown into the sea, to avert the wrath of Apollo. On extraordinary occasions lustrations were performed for a whole city. So Athens was purified by Epimenides after the Cylonian massacre, and Delos in the Peloponnesian War (426 B.C.) to stop the plague and appease the wrath of Apollo. In Rome, besides such annual ceremonies as the Ambarvalia, Lupercalia, Cerialia, Paganalia, &c., there was a lustration of the fleet before it sailed, and of the army before it marched. Part of the ceremonial always consisted in leading or carrying the victims round the impure persons or things. After any disaster the lustratio classium or exercitus was often again performed, so as to make certain that the gods got all their due. The Amburbium, a solemn procession of the people round the boundaries of Rome, was a similar ceremonial performed for the whole city on occasions of great danger or calamity; the Ambilustrium (so called from the sacrificial victims being carried round the people assembled on the Campus Martius) was the purificatory ceremony which took place after the regular quinquennial census (lustrum) of the Roman people.
See C. F. Hermann, Griechische Altertümer, ii.; G. F. Schömann, ib. ii.; P. Stengel, Die griechischen Kultusaltertümer (1898); Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, iii. p. 200 (1885); P. E. von Lasaulx, Die Sühnopfer der Griechen und Römer (1841); J. Donaldson, “On the Expiatory and Substitutionary Sacrifices of the Greeks,” in Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, xxvii., 1876; and the articles by A. Bouché-Leclercq in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités, and by W. Warde Fowler in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (3rd ed., 1891).
- ↑ Maimacteria does not actually occur in ancient authorities as the name of a festival.
