This system of law differs from others in this important respect, that the highest nobility and bravest heroes of the Christian Orient were the most zealous and successful jurists. We cannot give them a special notice. The most distinguished was John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa, Ascalon, and Rama, born about the year 1200. His attempts to restore the lost _Lettres du Sepulcre_ has succeeded so well that his work has, until recently, been regarded as identical with those lost books, and even _now_, when the laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem are spoken of, the work of John of Ibelin is generally understood to be meant. It was this very book which the barons of the kingdom of Cyprus, in 1368, when Peter I, by his arbitrary rule, had subverted justice, set up in a solemn assembly as the code of the kingdom. In order to make it as like as possible to the _Lettres du Sepulcre_, it was sealed in the same manner, placed in a closed chest, and kept in the cathedral of Nicosia, and this chest was not allowed to be opened except in the presence of the king and four vassals. When in the year 1489 the republic of Venice obtained, through Catharine Cornaro, possession of the isle of Cyprus, the republic bound itself by a solemn act to observe these assizes. The copy which had been preserved at Nicosia was subsequently lost by some unknown event, and when in the mean time the French language had ceased to be the prevailing one, there was a commission appointed in the year 1531 to make out a new text from the best manuscripts which could be found. This revision of the assizes of Jerusalem was translated into Italian, and was still in use in 1571, making the period during which it was in force almost five centuries. Having thus traced the external history of this system, we now turn to its material contents. No one any longer regards the forming of a system of law as an independent, arbitrary, or accidental thing. Every such must be a product and copy of the entire intellectual life of the age, and this piece of legislation is indeed a true mirror of the Christian world in Europe at the time; and the outline only rises more sharply, boldly, and clearly to view, because there is presented to us at the same time so rare a phenomenon in the march of civilization as the building up of a state organization, for which there is no foundation in the land where it is to be established. The manner in which the spiritual elements fermented and boiled at that time in the Occident--how the most shocking rudeness and barbarism throve side by side with the most exalted religious enthusiasm--the lowest forms of materialism by the side of spiritual fanaticism--superstition, ignorance, and vile falsehood, side by side with energy, valor, and generosity--all this is drawn with sharpest features in the assizes.