Journey Into Cyprus by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448156115
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER EIGHT

Poseidon’s City

LOLLED ON A chair by the sea-front of Limassol, sipping a glass of wine, I felt the rain-scarred valleys of the Troodos ebb away. All that lost and heady world was suddenly strange enough for me to have dreamt it, while dozing on the promenade.

Limassol is to Cyprus what Osaka is to Japan – cheerful and rather vulgar. It has a useful port and some light industry – fruit canning, wine distilling – and in late summer the air is filled with the smell of carobs. The town still accommodates the families of two thousand British servicemen from the bases of Akrotiri and Episkopi, half of whom seemed to be strolling up and down the seafront that day or sitting in the open cafés drinking and turning pink in the sun. Some Cypriot youths lounged along the wharf, watching the cargo ships anchored half a mile offshore; a Limassol businessman was arguing a deal with an Englishman, who refused to be cheated, and some United Nations soldiers, buttocks swelling out of their shorts, lumbered among the sun-softened populace.

The city’s shabbiness is not that of decay, but of a too-quick growth. By Cypriot standards it is young. When an English vessel of the Third Crusade was almost wrecked on its shores in 1191 this was only a small town, overawed for centuries by ancient Amathus a few miles to the west. On board the ship were Berengaria of Navarre, the fiancée of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and Richard’s sister Joanna, Queen Dowager of Sicily. The self-appointed emperor Isaac Comnenus, who had ruled Cyprus harshly and independently of Constantinople for seven years, came to meet the royal women, and attempted to coax them ashore. But when they demurred, he refused them fresh water, and a week later the bulk of the English fleet appeared on the horizon ‘and found the ladies outside the port of Limezun, exposed to the winds and the sea’.1 Richard, seasick and fuming at the insult to his betrothed, landed his men and prepared for a full-scale invasion. Hastily he married Berengaria in the Chapel of St George at Limassol, and the same day had her crowned Queen of England, and himself King of Cyprus. She, it is said, was dark-eyed and delicate, and her cenotaph in Le Mans Cathedral shows her beautiful, dressed as a bride, with her hair parted down the middle in the way of mediaeval virgins.

By now Richard must have realized the strategic and commercial value of Cyprus, and he subjugated the whole island. Isaac surrendered, it is said, on condition that he would not be put in irons, so the king threw him into silver chains and had him taken to Palestine, where he died in the dungeons of Margat.

This was how Cyprus fell to the Crusaders. Soon afterwards Richard, ever short of money, offered it to the Templars for a hundred thousand besants, but the knights could not control the populace and a year later he gave the island to Guy de

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