While a national revolt deprived the Emperor of Bulgaria, Cyprus was lost to a meaner force. Isaac Comnenus, a distant relative of the Emperor Manuel II., raised rebellion among the Cypriots and defeated the fleet and army which his namesake of Constantinople sent against him. He held out for six years, and appeared likely to establish a permanent kingdom in the island. This revolt was of the worst augury to the empire. It had often lost provinces by the invasion of barbarian hordes, or the rebellion of subject nationalities. But that a native rebel should sever a civilized Greek province from the empire, and reign as “Emperor of Cyprus,” was a new phenomenon. By the imperial theory the idea of an independent “Empire of Cyprus” was wholly monstrous and abnormal. The successful rebellion of Isaac Comnenus pointed to the possibility of a general breaking up of the Byzantine dominion into fragments, a danger that had never appeared before. Till now the provinces had always obeyed the capital, and no instance had been known of a rebel maintaining himself by any other way than the capture of Constantinople. Isaac Comnenus might, however, have founded a dynasty in Cyprus, if he had not quarrelled with Richard Coeur-de-Lion, the crusading King of England. When he maltreated some shipwrecked English crews, Richard punished him by landing his army in Cyprus and seizing the whole island. Isaac was thrown into a dungeon, and the English king gave his dominions to Guy of Lusignan, who called in Frank adventurers to settle up the land, and made it into a feudal kingdom of the usual Western type. While Isaac II. was in the midst of his Bulgarian war, and misconducting it with his usual fatuity, he was suddenly dethroned by a palace intrigue. His own brother, Alexius Angelus, had hatched a plot against him, which worked so successfully that Isaac was caught, blinded, and immured in a monastery long before his adherents knew that he was in danger. Alexius III. never showed any other proof of energy save this skilful _coup d‘état_ aimed against his brother. He continued the Bulgarian war with the same ill-success that had attended Isaac’s dealings with it. He plunged into a disastrous struggle with the Seljouk Sultan of Iconium, and he quarrelled with the Emperor Henry VI., who would certainly have invaded his dominions if death had not intervened to prevent it. But as long as Alexius was permitted to enjoy the pleasures of the table in his villas on the Bosphorus, the ill-success abroad of his arms and his diplomacy vexed him but little.