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PREFACE THE Ottoman Conquest of Cyprus in 1571 found, no less than the British Occupation of 1878, a goodly number of chroniclers, some of them eyewitnesses of the events which they described. Of the three hundred years which elapsed between these two noteworthy dates in Cypriot history we know very little. Visitors came and went, complained of the heat and the dis-comforts of travel, and commented with more or less acumen on the information which filtered to them through their interpreters. But to two writers we can appeal as authorities, both residents, intelligent men, and directly interested in knowing the true condition of the island. The first, the Abbé Giovanni Mariti, was for some years an official of the Imperial and Tuscan Consulates, and published at Lucca in 1769 his Viaggi per V isola di Cipro. The second, Cyprianos, a native, and Archimandrite of the archbishop of Cyprus, published at Venice in 1788 his Chronological History of the Island of Cyprus. I have printed in the Excerpta Cypria a translation into English of the account given by the latter of Cypriot affairs between 1571 and 1788. In the present volume I have given an exact rendering of the former, adding (in Chapters XXVI—XXVIII) in a rather more compressed form the substance of Chapters IX—XI of the second volume of

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