But when the old Armenian monarchy was broken up (1079–80), Rupen, a kinsman of the Bagratid Kings, with many of his countrymen, took refuge in the Taurus. His first descendants ruled as _barons_, a title adopted apparently from the Crusaders, but still preserved in Armenia. Leon, the great-great-grandson of Rupen, was consecrated King under the supremacy of the Pope and the Western Empire in 1198. The kingdom was at its zenith under Hetum or Hayton I., husband of Leon’s daughter Isabel (1224–1269); he was, however, prudent enough to make an early submission to the Mongols, and remained ever staunch to them, which brought his territory constantly under the flail of Egypt. It included at one time all Cilicia, with many cities of Syria and the ancient Armenia Minor, of Isauria and Cappadocia. The male line of Rupen becoming extinct in 1342, the kingdom passed to John de Lusignan, of the royal house of Cyprus, and in 1375 it was put an end to by the Sultan of Egypt. Leon VI., the ex-king, into whose mouth Froissart puts some extraordinary geography, had a pension of 1000_l._ a year granted him by our Richard II., and died at Paris in 1398. The chief remaining vestige of this little monarchy is the continued existence of a _Catholicos_ of part of the Armenian Church at Sis, which was the royal residence. Some Armenian communities still remain both in hills and plains; and the former, the more independent and industrious, still speak a corrupt Armenian. Polo’s contemporary, Marino Sanuto, compares the kingdom of the Pope’s faithful Armenians to one between the teeth of four fierce beasts, the _Lion_ Tartar, the _Panther_ Soldan, the Turkish _Wolf_, the Corsair _Serpent_. (_Dulaurier_, in _J. As._ sér. V. tom. xvii.; _St. Martin, Arm._; _Mar. San._ p. 32; _Froissart_, Bk. II. ch. xxii. _seqq._; _Langlois, V. en Cilicie_, 1861, p. 19.) NOTE 2.—“_Maintes villes et maint chasteaux_.” This is a constantly recurring phrase, and I have generally translated it as here, believing _chasteaux (castelli)_ to be used in the frequent old Italian sense of a _walled_ village or small walled town, or like the Eastern _Kala’_, applied in Khorasan “to everything—town, village, or private residence—surrounded by a wall of earth.” (_Ferrier_, p. 292; see also _A. Conolly_, I. p. 211.) Martini, in his _Atlas Sinensis_, uses “_Urbes_, _oppida_, castella,” to indicate the three classes of Chinese administrative cities.