d'armes*, and its selection for that purpose was due less to its fitness for the purpose than to a fantastic whim of Disraeli's, backed up by the roseate report of its potential wealth sent in by one of our consuls who had an interest in the island.
Disraeli many years before, as a quite young man, had in his novel "Tancred" advanced half jestingly the idea of a great Asiatic empire under an English monarchy, and Cyprus was to be specially included in it as recalling the historic fact that our English king, Richard Cœur de Lion, had once been also its sovereign. The whole thing was a piece of romantic fooling, but Disraeli loved to turn his political jests into realities and to persuade his English followers, whom as a Jew he despised, in all seriousness to the ways of his own folly.
The really important object aimed at by Layard in the Convention—and it was certainly his rather than Salisbury's, who was new to office and whose experience the year before at Constantinople had made him anything but a Turcophile—was to acquire the strategic control of Asia Minor, which it was thought might be effected through the ambulant consular posts it created.
These were to supervise the civil administration in the provinces, and see that the peasantry were not too much robbed by those who farmed the taxes, and that the recruiting grounds of the Ottoman army were not depopulated by mismanagement.
Thus the advance of Russia to the Mediterranean might, it was thought, be checked in Asia as their advance in Europe had been checked at San Stefano.
Looking back at the position now, with our knowledge of subsequent events, and especially of the Sultan Abdul Hamid's character, it seems strange both that the Sultan should have signed such a Convention which, if it had been carried out, would have put Asiatic Turkey as much