century more to constitute the great national factors of modern history. But out of the whirlpool little states like Cyprus do not emerge ; and after the death of King Janus, the causes that were at work worked quickly and steadily. The immediate cause of the break-up was connected with the same sort of religious disputes which, after occupying half the century in councils and debates, left the Byzantine empire defenceless before the Ottomans. King John III, who succeeded in 1432, took for his second wife, in 1435, Helena, the daughter of the despot of the Péloponnèse, Theodore Paleologus. The house of Lusignan had been hitherto, as a matter of necessity, devotedly Catholic ; the house of Paleologus was devotedly orthodox ; Cyprus was a Catholic kingdom with an orthodox population; a Latin king with a Greek people ; the Latin Church was rich, and the Greek Church was not poor, but the political power was engrossed by the former. Helena would not see this. She determined, if she could, to make Cyprus orthodox; she, through her husband, who was a weak and vicious man, refused the papal nominee to the archbishopric of Nicosia, imprisoned him, and was accused of poisoning him. The grand-master of Rhodes came in, as usual, in the part of a peace-maker, and prevailed on the king to receive the prelate ; and soon after, in 1458, both Helena and her husband died. But the quarrel had shaken the tottering kingdom ; the grand Caraman, the Turcoman ruler of Caramania, took the opportunity of these quarrels to seize Corycus, the last Frank stronghold of Armenia. The Cilician and Syrian begs, with the Egyptian sultan, formed a league for the conquest of Cyprus, which was foiled by the Rhodian galleys, or the Latin kingdom would have succumbed before the capture of Constantinople. The end was clearly coming, and it was not now a question between Venetians and Genoese, but between Christian and Moslem, which should take the