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CLAUDE DELAVAL COBHAM
Exerpta Cypria
page 130

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bastion full of cannon above and below, to command the ditches on both sides. It has too several round towers in its circuit, and within a broad road for cavalry right round the city. Its fosses are quarried out with the hammer, and are high, deep and bread: in the middle is a smaller fosse. The walls of the fosse are as high, or higher than the cornice of the walls, and the earth outside is scarped so that one scarcely sees outside two brazza of wall : nor can one see the city, that is the houses, except the Latin cathedral and a little of the Greek, because they are high. These buildings, as we have heard, they have in this present nproar made into towers full of earth, aud so with other churches and houses. It has two gates, one on the shore, and the other opening on the interior of the island ; this last has two draw-bridges and both are well armed and garrisoned. The sea gate opens on to the middle of the harbour, which is now small. The ditches of the city are dry. in the days of the kings it had also an arsenal. Now the port is choked, because the Siguory takes no care for it, and is closed with a chain. The city has a streng castle, with ditches filled by the sea. It is high : just outside it is the shore, and it has a tower or bastion exactly at the mouth of the harbour, and inside this they draw the chain. The water is brackish except in three or fonr wells, which never fail. They have also plenty of cisterns, made generally of cement, which they renew every three years, and water which runs through the city, drawn by oxen from wells into a tank, and thence let into the city every morning and evening, supplying several fountains. The beasts turn these wheels incessantly. The air of the city is not too good, on account of (the many marshes of) Salamis. It is a little more than a mile in circuit. The city is a fair one, with a fine square and adorned with Latin and Greek churches. There are monasteries too of the four mendicant Orders, but poor and very shabby. The country outside is all sand, but towards the south it has vineyards and beautiful gardens, with all kinds of fruit. And eveiy six or eight days they water them by means of beasts which turn great wheels and draw from the wells all the water they want. They use these wheels all over the island wherever they want to water gardens or cotton, both at Nicosia and in the villages, because the plain is bare of trees by reason of the great heat. And unless they watered, as I have said, everything would be bnmt up and diy except the olive and carob trees which do not care for water. After the destruction of Salamis the Greeks retired to this city, and fixed here their Archbishopric, which lasted until Pope Alexander set it in Nicosia. The city is in the plain near the sea facing south, a hundred miles from the mainland. It is 12 leagues from Nicosia, 50 miles from Salines by sea and 8 leagues by land, 30 miles from Cape della Grea. Here rests the body of S. Epiphanios, and there is preserved one of the waterpots in which was the water turned by our Lord into wine at the marriage, with other relics. And Fra Pietro Thoinaso, Patriareh of Constantinople, was buried in the Carmini amid many miracles : he was a brother of that Order. CALEPIO. Fra Angelo Calepio, of Cyprus, a Doctor in Theology of the Order of Preachers, Vicar General of the Province of Terra Santa, is known to ns only from the two narratives in which he describes the siege and capture of Nicosia aud Famagusta. Of the fh*st of these disasters he was an eye-witness, being in 1570 Superior of the Dominican Convent in Nicosia. He will tell us how he was taken prisoner by a Dervish, sold to the captain of a galley, and carried to Constantinople : ransomed, and again imprisoned by Kilij Ali as a Papal spy. During his second imprisonment he collected from Iiis fellow-captives all that they could tell him about the fall of Famagusta (borrowing almost in its entirety the narrative of N. Martinengo, 122 EXCERPTA CYPRIA.

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