102 Gasparis
The lands sequestered from the Greek landowners and from the Greek
Church came into the possession of the Frankish king, who kept a portion of
them and distributed the rest to his Frankish subjects, the Latin Church and
monasteries, as well as to the military orders of Templars and Hospitallers.37
The royal estates included villages and lands, which would either be exploited
directly or leased out. These estates gradually grew through the annexation of
fiefs that reverted to the fisc, either because their owners had died heirless or
because they had lost their rights to their land.
The Franks who had followed and supported the first king from Syria in his
new dominion, or who arrived to the island shortly after, formed the local noble
feudal class. This class was relatively small among the population of the island
during the first decades of the 13th century, but their number increased dur-
ing the same century as nobles continued to arrive from Syria. It is estimated
that Guy de Lusignan distributed 300 fiefs to knights and 200 to sergeants, and
that the number of noble feudatory families on Cyprus never exceeded 200,
during the 13th and 14th centuries.38 Only a very small segment of these feu-
datories participated directly in the administration of the kingdom, which was
the responsibility mainly of the king and his council. The feudatories were of
noble descent and adherents to the Latin creed, both of which disqualified the
Greeks and other residents of the island from entering this class. The num-
ber of feudatories did not increase very much partly due to the observance of
primogeniture rather than partible inheritance. The occasional reduction of
their number, during the 14th century, was due to a variety of reasons, some-
times political, as at times some of the feudatories were persecuted or expelled
from the island, died during the Black Death around 1348, or captured by the
Genoese during the war of 1373–1374. On those occasions, their property either
reverted to the king or was redistributed amongst the remaining or newly
arrived feudatories.
The feudal class of the Latin nobles was divided into three tiers, depending
on the type of fief that each feudatory owned. Right from the start, the king-
dom’s fiefs were classified into three categories, depending on the type of mili-
tary service that their owners owed. This was decided by the size of each fief
37 For the land owned by the Latin and Greek Church, as well as by other religious for-
mations see the chapter by Nicholas Coureas in this volume. For the military orders in
Cyprus see Anthony Luttrell, “Τα στρατιωτικά Τάγματα” [“The Military Orders”], in Iστορία
της Kύπρου, 4A:733–57.
38 For a detailed analysis of the structure of the noble feudatory class in Cyprus see W.H.
Rudt de Collenberg, “Δομή και προέλευση της τάξεως των ευγενών,” in Iστορία της Kύπρου, 4A:
785–841, esp. 785–810.