The Cyprus Research Centre has been making a major contribution to the history of Latin Cyprus. This, the latest in its series of texts, is edited by an experienced historian who has already published the cartulary of the Latin cathedral of Nicosia and the Synodicum Nicosiense. It adds significantly to the published sources available to those historians who are interested in the relations of the papacy with other Christian Churches in the Middle Ages. An older, relatively passive, approach had prevailed when Palestine and Syria were conquered by the First Crusade. The western settlements established by the crusaders were anyway exposed to pressure from the Muslims and their rulers soon became disinclined to alienate the peoples whom they now ruled. The Latin bishops made no effort to impose uniformity on the Orthodox, Monophysite and Nestorian Churches. They were prepared to oversee them at a distance through the vicars whom they appointed as their intermediaries. Cyprus, on the other hand, was seized by the Third Crusade in 1191, nearly a century later, at a time when papal policy was about to change. The popes became more insistent on the subjection of non-Latin Christians to their perceived rights of jurisdiction and they were much less prepared to tolerate divergences in faith. The newly established Latin Church on Cyprus gained the right to be treated, like its Greek predecessor, as autocephalous, but this did not mean much, given the papacy's suspicion of the intermediary powers of patriarchs. The first half of the thirteenth century was marked by a more pro-active approach on the part of the papacy and its representatives. A period of experimentation and confrontation, described in an authoritative introduction written by Jean Richard, the doyen of Cypriot and crusade studies, ended with the imposition on the Greeks of a Uniate Church. So this edition of all the papal letters that survive from the first century of western rule over Cyprus, many of them published for the first time, will be a valuable resource.