powerful lords themselves. There were about 600 men eligible to vote in the Court according to the Assise. The court in the 13th century There was also a Cour des Bourgeois in the kingdom but in the 12th century the two do not seem to have met together. They began to do so in the 13th century when the capital of the kingdom had been moved to Acre, and the leaders of the merchant colonies in the coastal cities were also allowed to sit (but not vote). By this time central authority had eroded so much that the more powerful nobles often had their own courts. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II opposed the authority of the court while he was staying in Acre during the Fifth Crusade, and it was temporarily abolished from 1232 to 1244. In its place the Commune of Acre was set up, which invoked the Assise against him, although his army was much larger than any force the remnant of the kingdom could muster. The Commune, unlike the Court, included the burgesses. Meanwhile, the Haute Cour of the Kingdom of Cyprus adopted basically the same structure. Significance Most of our information on the court comes from John of Ibelin's description of it, written in the 1260s. His description was an idealized explanation of the laws and procedures, based on the idea that Godfrey of Bouillon, the first king of Jerusalem, had personally established it and that it had remained unchanged since then (in the 13th century Godfrey was already a legendary figure). This was not the case, although it did develop much more slowly than similar contemporary courts elsewhere in Europe. Unlike France or England, the kingdom was not developing into a centralized parliamentary government – in fact it developed the opposite way, with the king losing more and more power to the barons. The court had essentially fossilized the feudalism of northern France circa 1100; because the kingdom was constantly at war, covered so little land, had so few westerners, and survived in Jerusalem for less than a hundred years, it did not have a chance to develop into a true Parliament. John of Ibelin's description, while useful, was taken too literally by later historians. In the 19th century, the court was commonly held to be the purest representation of feudalism in all of the Middle Ages, although today this is considered too simplistic. The