Isabella was the youngest of King Amalric’s children, born to his second wife, the Byzantine Princess Maria Comnena, after his coronation. In the eyes of many contemporary legal scholars, this gave her precedence over her elder half-siblings, born of a dissolved marriage before her father was crowned. She was, however, only 2 years old at the time of her father’s sudden death, and the High Court of Jerusalem had elected her half-brother Baldwin as her father’s successor. Nevertheless, her unimpeachable legitimacy and close ties to the Byzantine royal house made her a latent threat to Agnes de Courtenay’s two children, born of an invalid marriage before Amalric was anointed.
Agnes sought to reduce the risk to her offspring by removing Isabella from her mother and stepfather’s care at age 8 to betroth her to a man unlikely to defend Isabella’s claims to the crown. The man she chose was Humphrey IV of Toron. Humphrey was a minor under the control of his mother’s third husband, the infamous Reynald de Châtillon. Châtillon conducted the marriage negotiations on his ward’s behalf, but not necessarily in his interests. Humphrey lost his barony, which reverted to the crown in exchange for a money fief. Three years later, at age 11, Isabella married Humphrey in Châtillon’s fortress of Kerak in the midst of a Saracen siege. When Baldwin IV died less than two years later, the majority of the High Court chose Isabella as their queen over her sister Sibylla. Humphrey preferred to do homage to the usurpers Sibylla and Guy rather than wear the crown himself. He loyally fought with King Guy at Hattin and went into captivity with him. On his release from Saracen detention, he joined Guy at the siege of Acre, and Isabella joined him there.
Thus, Isabella was living in his tent in the siege camp outside Acre when in October 1190, her sister Queen Sibylla succumbed to illness and died without heirs. It is worth reviewing this in detail since the most fulsome contemporary account of what happened next has coloured all subsequent histories and warped perceptions of Isabella ever since.
The anonymous Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, written by someone close to the English court, describes with blistering outrage how Conrad de Montferrat had long schemed to ‘steal’ the throne of Jerusalem and, at last, struck upon the idea of abducting Isabella – a crime he compares to the abduction of Helen of Sparta by Paris of Troy, ‘only worse’. To realise his plan, the Itinerarium claims, Conrad ‘surpassed the deceits of Sinon, the eloquence of Ulysses and the forked tongue of Mithridates’. According to this English cleric, who was unlikely to have ever met any of the principals, Conrad set about bribing, flattering and corrupting bishops and barons as never before in recorded history. Throughout, the chronicler says, Conrad was aided and abetted by three barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Sidon, Haifa and Ibelin) who combined ‘the treachery of Judas, the cruelty of Nero, and the wickedness of Herod, and everything the present age abhors and ancient times condemned’.25 The anonymous slanderer then admits that, although Isabella at first resisted the idea of divorcing Humphrey, she was soon persuaded to consent to it because ‘a woman’s opinion changes very easily’ and ‘a girl is easily taught to do what is morally wrong’.26
It should be clear to modern readers that something is wrong with this account. First, the author notably brings no evidence of a single act of treachery, cruelty or wickedness and, second, completely ignores the High Court of Jerusalem and its constitutional right to elect kings and select husbands for heiresses. Rather than looking at the legitimate interests of the kingdom and the political forces at play, the chronicler wallows in melodrama, slander and prejudice.
The situation looks significantly different if seen through the eyes of the power brokers on the ground in Acre in 1190: the barons of Jerusalem. The hereditary queen was dead. She had been predeceased by all her children, while her husband had been foisted upon the kingdom in a secret marriage that circumvented their legitimate constitutional right to select husbands for heiresses to the crown. Sibylla had then usurped the crown, without obtaining the consent of the High Court for her coronation, and personally crowned the man she had promised to set aside. This man had promptly attacked his most powerful baron, the Count of Tripoli, driving the latter into an alliance with Saladin. When threatened by a Saracen invasion, he arrogantly ignored the military advice of the collective barons. As a result, the army was crushed, thousands of Christians killed and many more enslaved, while Saladin swept over and occupied the entire kingdom, bar only a single city.
In short, Guy had been detested since he married Sibylla ten years earlier, and his popularity had declined ever since. By October 1190, he had not a shred of credibility or support left, and with Sibylla’s death, he lost the last lingering whiff of legitimacy. In short, anointed or not, the barons refused to view him as their king and were determined to elect a new monarch.
In the established tradition of seeking a new monarch from among the closest relatives of the deceased monarch, the barons focused on Sibylla’s most immediate blood relation, namely her sister Isabella, whose claim to the throne was arguably better than Sibylla’s (or Baldwin IV’s) claim had ever been. The barons were happy to recognise Isabella as their reigning queen, but in so doing, her husband would automatically become king consort and commander of Jerusalem’s armies.
That was the problem. Isabella’s husband, Humphrey de Toron, was as unacceptable to the barons as Guy de Lusignan, if for different reasons. Aside from his alleged femininity, he had already betrayed the High Court in 1186, when they offered him the crown only for him to do homage to the very man they were trying to depose. The barons would not have Humphrey as their king, which meant their support for Isabella was contingent upon her setting Humphrey aside and marrying the man of their choice as she should have done in the first place. It will be remembered that the High Court had also required Isabella’s father (Amalric I) to separate from his wife, Agnes de Courtenay, before it recognised him as king.
In short, there were legal precedents and rational reasons for the barons’ actions that the Itinerarium ignores in its effort to explain events as base deeds of ‘corruption’, ‘treachery’ and ‘cruelty’. Far from being corrupted by a treacherous, greedy and corrupt Montferrat, the barons of Jerusalem chose a man they believed would serve their interests best. In November 1190, the barons and burghers of Jerusalem wanted a militarily competent leader around whom they could rally, and there were not many candidates available after the debacle of Hattin. Conrad de Montferrat, however, seemed to fit the bill.
This Italian nobleman had rescued the only free city in the kingdom when it was on the brink of surrender. He had defended it twice against sieges by Saladin, thereby retaining a bridgehead in the Levant into which massive reinforcements had been poured, first from Sicily and then from farther West. Nor were Montferrat’s military successes in the Holy Land his first; he had a distinguished military career fighting in the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires. As an outsider, he did not raise one local baron above the others. Finally, he was the first cousin of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and a more distant cousin of Philip II of France. As such, he was a far more suitable spouse for the ruling queen of Jerusalem than the obscure and impoverished Guy de Lusignan had been.
His only flaw was that his second wife, a Byzantine princess, was still alive in Constantinople. Montferrat somehow convinced the barons she was dead or that he was legally separated from her, or perhaps he simply convinced them to close their eyes to this undesirable fact as they had once been willing to ignore Baldwin I’s marriage to the Armenian Lady Arda when he married Adelaide of Sicily. What no one could cover up or overlook, however, was the fact that Isabella had been married to Humphrey de Toron since 1183. This marriage needed to be publicly dissolved before marriage to Montferrat could be celebrated.
Four years earlier, Sibylla had promised her supporters she would set Guy aside after she was crowned, only to break her word and place the crown on Guy’s head. The surviving members of the High Court remembered that deceit all too well. Determined not to be tricked and trapped a second time, they insisted that Isabella rid herself of Humphrey before they would recognise her as queen. This is the context in which Isabella’s alleged ‘abduction’ took place.
As to what happened, all chronicles, including the Itinerarium, are in surprising agreement. Shortly after Sibylla’s death, knights entered the tent Isabella shared with Humphrey and removed her against her will. She was not, however, taken to Conrad, much less raped by him, but rather put in the care and protection of high-ranking clerics. She was sequestered and protected to prevent harm from coming to her while a clerical court was convened to rule on the validity of her marriage to Humphrey. The case hinged on the critical theological principle of mutual consent. Humphrey claimed that Isabella had consented, but when challenged by a witness to prove his word with his body (i.e., in judicial combat), Humphrey hung his head and refused to take up the thrown gauntlet. Isabella testified that she had not consented.
Ultimately, a clerical court headed by the papal legate ruled that Isabella’s marriage to Humphrey was invalid because, regardless of consent, she was not of legal age at the time of the marriage. That is, she was not yet 12 years old, the age at which girls were deemed adults and legally capable of giving consent. On 24 November 1190, Isabella married Conrad de Montferrat. Immediately following the marriage, the barons of Jerusalem did homage to her as their queen.
The question that remains is Isabella’s role in this affair. There seems little doubt she was taken by surprise when strange knights burst into her tent in the dark of night and dragged her away from the man she had viewed as her husband for the past ten years. When they took her, she could not have known what they intended to do. She may have believed they were Saracens in disguise or simply unscrupulous men intent on rape for the sake of a crown. Resistance was logical and understandable.
Once she had been separated from Humphrey and put under Church protection, however, the situation was explained to her by her mother, the dowager queen of Jerusalem, Maria Comnena. The Lyon Continuation of William of Tyre’s history, which is believed to be based primarily on sources from within the crusader states rather than Western sources states:
[Queen Maria] remonstrated with [Isabella] repeatedly and explained that she [Isabella] could not become lady of the kingdom unless she left Humphrey. She reminded her of the evil deed that [Humphrey] had done … [when he] had done homage to Queen Sibylla. … So long as Isabella was his wife, she could have neither honour nor her father’s kingdom.27
This text confirms that Isabella was initially reluctant to take her mother’s advice because she presumably loved Humphrey. Yet all sources agree that, in the end, she not only testified she had not legally consented to the marriage with Humphrey but also went willingly into the marriage with Montferrat. The latter is significant. While the clerical court ruled that Isabella’s marriage to Toron – when she was only 11 – was invalid, it also explicitly told her she was free to marry whomever she chose now. She could have decided to remarry Humphrey immediately; she did not. The reason seems obvious. Isabella understood that the barons refused categorically to do homage to Humphrey. She could not have both Humphrey and her kingdom. Unlike her sister Sibylla, Isabella chose the crown over the man.
The following spring, the kings of England and France arrived with large armies to reinforce the stalled siege of Acre. Philip II of France recognised his cousin Conrad de Montferrat as king of Jerusalem, but Richard I of England backed Guy de Lusignan. As long as the powerful western monarchs were present in the Holy Land, squabbles over claims to a kingdom that had effectively ceased to exist seemed irrelevant. Guy continued to call himself king yet docilely followed Richard the Lionheart wherever he went. Conrad remained in Tyre and tried to cut a separate peace with Saladin, while the sultan attempted to play Conrad against Richard.
Meanwhile the crusaders forced the garrison of Acre to surrender on 12 July 1191. Immediately afterwards, the French king abandoned the crusade, weakening Conrad’s (and Isabella’s) position, while the rest of the crusading army continued down the coast under Richard the Lionheart’s leadership. Outside Arsuf on 7 September, the joint Frankish/crusader army effectively rebuffed an attempt by Saladin to halt their advance. On 10 September, they recaptured Jaffa and turned towards the ultimate goal: Jerusalem.
Saladin, however, had garrisoned Jerusalem strongly and poisoned the wells around it. By late December, the crusaders were forced to face the fact that they did not have the strength for an assault nor the time to besiege the city. More importantly, as the local barons, Templars and Hospitallers noted, even if they took Jerusalem by storm, they could not retain it for long because the vast majority of the crusaders would return to the West. The forces remaining in the Holy Land were insufficient to defend an isolated outpost such as Jerusalem against the overwhelming might of Saladin. The combined Frankish and crusader host withdrew to the coast.
Here, Richard of England received word that his brother John and the king of France were trying to steal his inheritance. Since he would soon have to return home to defend his empire, Richard finally conceded that he had to leave Jerusalem in the hands of a king capable of protecting the gains he had come so far and fought so hard to achieve. He agreed to let the barons of Jerusalem elect their king, as was their constitutional right, and they unanimously elected Conrad de Montferrat. Richard accepted their decision, dropping his support for Guy de Lusignan. The English king, however, softened the impact of withdrawing his support from Lusignan by allowing him to buy the island of Cyprus.
Richard had captured Cyprus on his way to Acre. While the Mediterranean island was technically a part of the Byzantine empire, an unpopular Greek tyrant, Isaac Comnenus, had seized it several years earlier and declared his independence from Constantinople. The English king captured the island in less than six weeks without incurring significant casualties, largely because he had been welcomed by most of the island’s residents as a liberator. He secured their continued cooperation by promising to restore the laws of Manuel I Comnenus, the powerful and highly respected Byzantine Emperor and so ruler of Cyprus from 1143 until 1180.
Yet Richard’s interests in Cyprus were not dynastic. He did not need or want another lordship. Richard the Lionheart was a consummate strategist who recognised Cyprus’ military and strategic importance in securing the lines of communication between the West and the Holy Land. Cyprus controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and, with it, the coast of the Levant. Richard rightly foresaw that Cyprus would become an important staging ground for future crusades and a breadbasket for the territorially diminished crusader states on the mainland. In other words, although the Third Crusade restored Frankish control over the key coastal cities and the coastal plain between them, this much-reduced kingdom was not self-sufficient in foodstuffs. It was dependent on supplies of many vital materials from Cyprus. By selling Cyprus to Lusignan, Richard replenished his coffers and distracted Guy from losing his former kingdom while ensuring Cyprus remained in Latin Christian hands.
Just when everything appeared settled, however, assassins struck down Conrad de Montferrat in the streets of Tyre on 28 April 1192. Mortally wounded, he was carried to Isabella and died in her arms. At the time, she was carrying his child.
Isabella was now a 20-year-old widowed queen. She was not a pawn; her barons had already paid homage to her. She could legally marry whomever she liked – or choose not to remarry. Yet she was also the queen of a fragile and vulnerable kingdom surrounded by enemies. The powerful crusading armies that had come to restore it were already disintegrating. The king of France had left, and the king of England had declared his intention to leave shortly. With him would go most of the crusaders. If Jerusalem were to survive, it would need a king capable of defending it, a king the barons respected and were willing to obey.
Most narratives of what happened next focus poetically on personalities rather than institutions. Some accounts say King Richard recommended a candidate as Isabella’s next husband, while other accounts claim that the ‘people of Tyre’ spontaneously acclaimed him. Both versions ignore – again – the geopolitical reality in Outremer. The notion of the common people of one city in the kingdom having the right to ‘elect’ a king by acclamation is ludicrous. By this time, Acre, Caesarea, Arsuf, Jaffa and Ascalon were also in Frankish hands. If the common citizens elected Jerusalem’s kings, then the burghers of all these cities would have had a say in his election. But the common people in the Kingdom of Jerusalem did not – and never had – elected their kings any more than the commoners of England or France did.
As for the English king, he had only days earlier acknowledged that the barons of Jerusalem had the sole right to select their king. Therefore, he would not have attempted to impose his candidate on them. The Lyon Continuation of Tyre correctly states that Richard acting ‘on the advice of the barons of the kingdom’ went to Tyre with their favoured candidate.28 Yet, it is equally unthinkable that the barons would have made a recommendation (as they had the last time) without first consulting their ruling queen and obtaining her consent. The man they proposed to King Richard was, therefore, most likely Isabella’s choice, possibly based on the advice of her barons, but not against her wishes. It was Henri de Champagne.
As the son of Marie de Champagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter by her first husband, Louis VII of France, Champagne was a nephew of both Philip II of France and Richard I of England. This made Champagne a worthy match for the ruling queen of Jerusalem and a highly diplomatic choice since neither the French nor English crown could object. He was also an ardent crusader who had come out to the Holy Land in advance of the main crusading armies. He was wealthy, young, courageous, courteous, educated and pious – in short, the personification of chivalry – and single. He was also just 26 years old. There is every reason to believe that Isabella knew and liked him before the proposal was put forward.
Yet the accounts of his selection agree he was a reluctant candidate for the crown of Jerusalem. On the one hand, he wanted to return home. On the other hand, Isabella was pregnant by Montferrat, which meant that if she bore a son, this boy would take precedence over any of Champagne’s children. The Lyon continuation of Tyre claims that Champagne was only persuaded to take up the burden of Jerusalem and marry Isabella because of promises made to him by Richard of England; the English king allegedly vowed to return with an even greater army in a couple of years and conquer all the former Kingdom of Jerusalem and more. The Itinerarium, on the other hand, claims that while the magnates of the kingdom were attempting to persuade a reluctant Henri to become their king, Isabella herself ‘came to the count of her own accord and offered him the keys of the city’.29 It goes on to say the marriage was hastily prepared and celebrated on 5 May 1192 (seven days after Conrad’s death). The author, who was so ready to insult Isabella, her mother and her stepfather a few pages earlier, now writes approvingly: ‘I don’t think that those who persuaded the count to do this had much to do, for it is no effort to force the willing’!30
The important point is that Isabella, with astonishing fortitude under the circumstances, was prepared to do the right thing for her kingdom: marry a man acceptable to her barons and do so without insisting on a year of mourning or other conditions. Henri proved his worth immediately; he persuaded his uncle Richard, and so, the entire crusading host, to remain in the Holy Land throughout the summer rather than return to the West at once. Although a second march on Jerusalem ended like the first and for the same reason, the English king’s dramatic victory over Saladin at Jaffa, at last, forced the sultan to the negotiating table. On 2 September 1192, Richard the Lionheart’s envoys, headed by Isabella’s husband and stepfather, signed a three-year truce with Saladin. As one of the last crusaders to depart, Richard the Lionheart sailed from Acre on 9 October 1192. Less than six months later, Saladin was dead. Isabella’s kingdom had been saved, if in a more compact form.
The following five years of Isabella’s life may have been amongst her happiest. She gave birth to Montferrat’s posthumous daughter, who she named after her mother, Maria. She also gave Champagne three daughters, Marguerite, Alice and Philippa; the latter two lived to adulthood. Because of the truce with Saladin, the kingdom was at peace, and the first steps towards economic recovery were possible. As the ceasefire neared its end, large contingents of crusaders started to arrive to the Holy Land in anticipation of a crusade led by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Although the emperor died before he reached the Holy Land, German nobles and knights succeeded in recapturing the important coastal city of Beirut and, with it, established Frankish control of the entire coastline from Arsur (Jaffa had since been lost again) to the County of Tripoli. Perhaps because they were still hoping to recapture Jerusalem, Isabella and Henri had not been ceremoniously crowned and anointed, yet they were otherwise treated as king and queen.
In a freak accident, Henri de Champagne tragically died falling from a balcony (or when the balcony or its railing collapsed), leaving Isabella a widow in October 1197. Henri was just 31 at his death, and his widow Isabella was 25.
Again, as an adult widow and reigning queen, Isabella could have insisted on her right to remain single. It is unlikely that the barons would have taken action against her had she asserted her rights. Yet Isabella was a queen first and a woman second. She knew that her kingdom was still exceedingly vulnerable. Only weeks before, Saladin’s brother al-Adil had been threatening at the gates of Acre; his army had barely been beaten off by the German crusaders and Isabella’s army. Now his forces had seized Jaffa. She did not have the luxury to mourn or vacillate if she wanted to have a kingdom. The kingdom needed a strong king capable of defending it.
Isabella’s choice – and it was undoubtedly her choice – fell on a man whom she had known long and well, namely Aimery de Lusignan, the older brother of her sister’s disgraced consort Guy. Aimery had come to the Holy Land earlier than Guy. He had been appointed constable in the reign of Baldwin IV. For roughly thirty years, he had been married to her step-father’s niece, Eschiva d’Ibelin. But Eschiva had recently died, leaving Aimery a widower with several young children. Furthermore, Aimery had succeeded his brother as lord of Cyprus, a rich island with substantial resources that would be of use to Jerusalem. Last but not least, in a savvy move, Aimery had done homage for Cyprus to the Holy Roman Emperor, thereby elevating the island lordship into a kingdom. This made him equal in status to the queen of Jerusalem.
There is every reason to believe that Isabella personally liked and respected Aimery. Yet she unquestionably chose him as her consort because he was well-suited to please her barons and secure their enthusiastic support. Aimery de Lusignan had already demonstrated his extraordinary capabilities. He had decades of experience fighting in the Holy Land and had already commanded Jerusalem’s armies as constable under Baldwin IV. More recently, he had turned a rebellious island into a secure and prosperous kingdom. Equally importantly, Aimery was an outstanding administrator. In addition to elevating his lordship to a kingdom, he had wisely adopted the Greek administrative apparatus left behind by the Byzantines. This worked like a well-oiled machine to generate revenues and reduce local tensions and resentment. With the Greek bureaucracy behind him, Aimery rapidly established peace with the natives while consciously encouraging more settlement from the disenfranchised Franks of Syria. Lastly, he was economically savvy and pursued a policy of economic diversification, which led almost immediately to burgeoning prosperity.
Isabella and Aimery married in December 1197 and were crowned jointly in Acre’s cathedral in January 1198. Afterwards, Aimery turned his many talents to the benefit of what remained of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He secured a six-year truce with al-Adil in the first year of his reign which he later renewed. He thereby created the peace needed to concentrate on the reconstruction of institutions, infrastructure and the economy. He also commissioned scholars to collect information and record as much as possible from as many sources as possible about the laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to re-establish a legal basis for society. Meanwhile, Isabella gave birth to Sibylla in October 1198, a second daughter Melisende in 1200 and, at long last, a son in 1201. The boy was named Aimery after his father.
Yet tragedy struck again in early 1205. On 2 February, little Aimery died in Acre of unknown causes. Less than two months later, on 1 April, King Aimery fell victim to food poisoning after eating fish that was apparently off. Isabella may have partaken of the same meal or developed another illness. At roughly 33 years of age, she died on 5 May 1205, leaving her eldest daughter, Maria de Montferrat, as her heir.
Isabella may not have put herself in the limelight as much as Queen Melisende, yet her judicious choices for consort in 1192 and again in 1197 assured that her kingdom survived as a political entity. She chose to remain in the background, but that is not synonymous with being powerless. She most certainly guided Champagne as he navigated in a unique and, to him, unfamiliar legal environment, and he was reportedly devoted and reluctant to be parted from her. While Aimery was more independent, there is no indication that he ever attempted to raise himself above his wife, as Fulk had done. They were crowned and reigned jointly only to die little more than a month apart.
Isabella’s heir was Maria, her daughter by Conrad de Montferrat. She was at most 13 and more likely 12 when her stepfather and mother died in early 1205. She was also still a maiden, and the High Court immediately appointed a regent to rule for her until a suitable candidate for her husband and consort could be identified. The High Court’s choice fell on her closest adult relative, her mother’s half-brother, John d’Ibelin.
John was the son of the Dowager Queen Maria Comnena by her second husband, Balian d’Ibelin. He had been appointed constable of the kingdom by King Aimery in 1197. However, he exchanged this post for the lordship of Beirut sometime before 1200, although the exact date is unknown. Beirut was one of the few cities in the kingdom to defy Saladin in 1187, and it paid a terrible price in assault, slaughter and plunder. German crusaders had recaptured the city from a Saracen garrison in 1197, but the city and surrounding countryside were in such a ruinous state that even the military orders did not want to assume the cost of restoring it. John d’Ibelin, however, succeeded in making it a functioning port that was soon producing immense revenues. It was probably this, as well as his blood ties to the young queen, that encouraged the High Court to appoint him regent, although he was, at most, 27 years old at the time.
The Lord of Beirut maintained the truces with the Ayyubids and acted as a conscientious caretaker of his niece’s kingdom, while representatives from the High Court requested that the French king select a suitable nobleman to be their queen’s consort. By 1208, a candidate had been identified, namely John de Brienne. Brienne’s title derived from a subsidiary county inside the County of Champagne, and John was, technically, only the regent of Brienne for his deceased elder brother’s minor heir. As such, he was at best of secondary rank, and the French king’s choice of this relatively obscure nobleman bordered on an insult to the once proud Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Yet Jerusalem was proud no more. It was symbolically and emotionally significant. It still commanded material wealth. But it was vulnerable and short of manpower. Beggars, as the expression goes, cannot be choosers. Besides, John de Brienne was a young and vigorous man, roughly 31, with a glamorous reputation on the tourney circuit. Furthermore, his cousin Walter of Montbéliard was then regent of Cyprus for King Hugh I, who was a minor. (Montbéliard had married the eldest of Hugh’s sisters.) Very likely, Montbéliard put in a good word for Brienne.
Yet, while Brienne’s reputation at arms was high, he was not a powerful lord with a large entourage or an extensive feudal base. To make up for this deficit, King Philip of France and the pope granted him large sums of money to hire mercenaries. In 1210, after almost two years of recruiting, John de Brienne arrived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem with an entourage estimated at 300 knights and an unknown number of squires, sergeants and archers. Although significant, this was not a vast crusading army likely to tip the balance of power in the Near East in favour of the Christians. Therefore, from the start, John was something of a disappointment to his subjects in Outremer.
Whether he was also a disappointment to his bride, the now 18-year-old Maria de Montferrat, is unknown. There is no reason to assume so. Not only was he a successful tournament champion, but he also came from the heartland of chivalry and was a writer of poetry and song. The couple was crowned jointly in Tyre, with most of the High Court in attendance.
This latter fact tempted the Saracens into launching an attack on Acre. Although the attack was beaten off, it was an inauspicious start to John and Maria’s reign. Maria’s new husband retaliated with a chevauchée (cavalry raid) of his own. Yet, while this did some damage and the participants returned loaded with loot, they achieved no lasting benefit for the kingdom. John next attempted to strike at Egypt with a sea-borne expedition into the Nile Delta. Unfortunately, he did not have sufficient force to do more than moderate damage to secondary targets. The Ayyubids concluded that John de Brienne was no Richard the Lionheart and was unlikely to do them serious harm. They brazenly began the construction of fortifications on Mount Tabor. These commanding heights threatened Nazareth, which the Christians had only recovered in 1204.
Meanwhile, John’s small host of crusaders had fulfilled their vows and returned home to France. John had little choice but to conclude a new six-year truce with the Saracens without territorial gains – the first time a treaty without territorial gain had been concluded since the Third Crusade. There can be little doubt that many men in John’s new kingdom were less than impressed by his performance. However, all might have been forgiven had he at least done his dynastic duty and produced a male heir. Instead, in November of 1212, Queen Maria gave birth to a daughter and died shortly afterwards. She was too young and had ruled too short a time to leave any notable mark on the kingdom; we have no idea what kind of queen she might have been. She left behind an infant, a female heir, the worst possible scenario. It immediately produced a constitutional crisis.
As king-consort, John’s right to the throne of Jerusalem was derived through his wife. Already in 1190–1192, the precedent had been set that the consort of a ruling queen did not retain his position after her death. Unsurprisingly, Brienne followed Guy de Lusignan’s precedent of refusing to accept his dismissal. Like Guy before him, Brienne insisted that he had been crowned and anointed for life, or at least until his infant daughter came of age and married.
Brienne’s daughter, known in history as Yolanda or Isabella II, made Brienne’s situation materially different from that of Guy de Lusignan. Guy’s daughters by Sibylla of Jerusalem had died before she did, leaving him no claim to a regency. Brienne, on the other hand, could reasonably argue that he was still ‘king’ of Jerusalem as long as his daughter was a minor. The argument won over most of the barons, with the notable exception of the former regent, the lord of Beirut and other members of the Ibelin clan.
Ibelin opposition to John de Brienne may have been based on principle. John d’Ibelin was famous for his understanding of the law. His legal opinion was highly respected and sought after in court cases. According to Philip de Novare, the famous legal scholar of the thirteenth century, Ibelin’s legal views were widely considered definitive. Furthermore, his parents had been Guy de Lusignan’s chief opponents when he claimed the crown after Queen Sibylla’s death. Yet, it was common practice for a minor’s closest relative, male or female, to serve as regent. In this case, the closest relative to the infant heiress, Yolanda, was her father. Beirut’s opposition was almost certainly more about self-interest than legal technicalities. When the rest of the High Court recognised Brienne as regent and continued to treat him as their king, the Ibelins withdrew to Cyprus. They expanded their power base and position of influence there without, of course, surrendering their mainland fiefs.
Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III was actively advocating a new crusade to regain Jerusalem by putting pressure on the sultan of Egypt. By now, the king of Sicily, king of the Germans and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, had come of age and dramatically taken the cross twice. There was a general expectation that he would lead this crusade and put the full financial and military might of the Holy Roman Empire behind it. However, Frederick II proved himself a reluctant crusader, easily distracted by other matters. He repeatedly postponed crusading for fifteen years. Instead, he sent others to fight for him, and the crusade, numbered by historians centuries later as the Fifth, was launched without him in 1217.
It was not until mid-1218 that enough men and troops arrived from the West for the crusade to begin in earnest. Chief among them, although not in command of any but his own contingent of vassals and their men, was the acting king of Jerusalem, John de Brienne. He was supported by virtually all the kingdom’s noblemen, except the Ibelins, who participated in the crusade under the banner of the Cypriot king. Surprisingly, Brienne succeeded in convincing his fellow crusaders from across Europe that any territorial gains made in Egypt would be ceded to the Kingdom of Jerusalem rather than individual leaders fighting in the crusade. As a result, when the crusaders captured the Egyptian city of Damietta after a siege lasting roughly a year and a half, Brienne was declared king in Damietta.
More importantly, the crusader capture of Damietta induced Egypt’s Sultan al-Kamil to offer to restore all the territory that had once been part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem – including Jerusalem and Bethlehem – to Christian control in exchange for the crusaders’ evacuation of Damietta. Brienne vigorously advocated for the acceptance of this offer. He was supported by the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, but overruled by the other crusading leaders, most notably the papal legate Pelagius and Frederick II’s deputy and representative, the Duke of Bavaria. This decision revealed all too clearly that the ‘king’ of Jerusalem was not taken particularly seriously by either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor.
Furthermore, the Ayyubids, trying to ease the pressure of the crusade on the Nile, struck at the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In a devastating raid, Saracen forces destroyed the coastal city of Caesarea and were soon threatening the Templar’s new stronghold at Athlit. The Templars and many barons and knights from Outremer abandoned the crusade in Egypt to hasten back to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and repulse the threat.
To Brienne’s credit, he did not despair. Instead, he undertook renewed efforts to bring the necessary financial and military resources to his beleaguered kingdom that would enable it to beat back its enemies and re-establish viable borders. To do so, he played his ‘trump card’, namely his daughter’s undeniable status as heiress to the kingdom. Brienne sought to improve his deficits as a king-consort (i.e., a man without significant financial or military resources) by marrying his daughter to the most powerful Western nobleman imaginable: the Holy Roman Emperor himself. While the strategy appeared to make sense, it ultimately backfired with disastrous consequences for Brienne, his daughter Yolanda and the entire kingdom.
In the summer of 1225, envoys arrived in Acre with the news that Yolanda’s father had negotiated her marriage to the most powerful monarch on earth, a man already calling himself ‘the Wonder of the World’. A proxy marriage was staged in Acre followed by a coronation in Tyre. Immediately afterwards, Yolanda set sail with a large escort of prelates and noblemen for Apulia. She arrived at Brindisi and married Frederick II in person on November 9, 1225; it was just days before or after her thirteenth birthday. Her bridegroom was a 30-year-old widower who maintained a harem in the Sicilian tradition.
Furthermore, the marriage got off to a terrible start. Yolanda’s father had negotiated for the marriage with implicit or explicit assurances from the emperor that John would remain king of Jerusalem until his death. Frederick Hohenstaufen had other ideas. He declared himself king of Jerusalem the day after the wedding and made the barons who had escorted Yolanda to Italy swear fealty to him at once.
Yolanda’s father was outraged, and so was the Master of the Teutonic Knights, Herman von Salza, who had been instrumental in the marriage negotiations. The latter strongly suggests that Brienne had not simply been deluding himself about retaining the crown after his daughter’s marriage. Frederick instantly made an enemy of his father-in-law, and the breach ensured that Yolanda never saw her father again before she died. Perhaps she did not miss him, given how little she had seen of him during her short life, but she certainly found no comfort or companionship in her husband. Although it is hard to distinguish facts from slander, the tales of Yolanda’s marriage are unremittingly negative.
Meanwhile, Frederick was under increasing pressure to fulfil his repeated promises to go to the aid of the Holy Land. He had first taken crusading vows in 1215 and eleven years later had nothing but excuses to show for it. During the negotiations for his marriage to Yolanda, he had promised to set out on crusade no later than August 1227 or face excommunication. In the summer of 1227, a great army assembled in Apulia to sail to the defence of Christian Syria, but before the crusaders could embark, a contagious disease spread among them, killing thousands. Frederick boarded a vessel but was so ill his companions urged him to return. Frederick put about and landed not in the Holy Land but in the Kingdom of Sicily. The pope promptly excommunicated him.
Throughout this, Yolanda – technically, the reigning queen of Jerusalem – was imprisoned in Frederick’s harem. Her husband and consort had not thought to take her with him when he set out for her kingdom. On 25 April 1228, Yolanda gave birth to a son, christened Conrad. Ten days later, on 5 May 1228, Yolanda of Jerusalem died. She was not yet 16 years old. Although she had been a queen almost from the day of her birth, not once had she exercised the authority to which she had been born.
To add insult to death, her husband Frederick II hardly took any notice of this fact. He continued to claim her kingdom as his right, despite denying his father-in-law the same dignity. Because of his disregard for the laws and customs of Yolanda’s kingdom, Frederick soon found himself at loggerheads with Jerusalem’s barons. In the end, Yolanda’s subjects defeated her husband, but only decades after she had been sacrificed on the altar of her father and husband’s ambitions.
Yolanda’s infant son was exactly one-month old when his father finally embarked on his long-anticipated crusade. On 21 July 1228, Frederick II landed in Cyprus, where he made a crude attempt to disseize and extort money from the regent of Cyprus, John d’Ibelin – the same John d’Ibelin, Lord of Beirut, who had been regent of Jerusalem for Maria de Montferrat. Frederick’s bullying, which included surrounding unarmed knights and barons attending a banquet with mercenaries wielding naked swords, met with granite resistance. Beirut bluntly told the emperor that he could arrest or kill him, but he would not surrender his barony nor give an account of his regency unless there was a judgement by the respective High Court against him. He then turned and walked out of the emperor’s banquet with most of the Cypriot knights and nobles in his wake. The battle lines had been drawn.
For the next twenty-two years, Frederick tried to assert authoritarian control over the Kingdom of Jerusalem without regard for the kingdom’s constitution. The fundamental problem was that Frederick II viewed the Kingdom of Jerusalem as just one of his many possessions without recognising it as an independent kingdom with unique traditions, customs and laws. He believed he could dispose of it and rule it as he liked. Most egregiously, he acted as if the inhabitants held their lands and titles not by hereditary right or royal charter but simply at his personal whim. He thereby violated the fundamental principles of feudalism that recognised that even a serf could not be expelled from his land without due process and just cause. Equally offensively, he also rejected the feudal principle of ruling with the advice and consent of the barons of the realm.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem, however, was a feudal state par excellance, frequently held up by scholars as the ‘ideal’ feudal kingdom. (See, for example, John La Monte’s work, Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100 to 1291, or John Riley Smith’s The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174–1277.) The nobility of Outremer in the age of Frederick II had already developed highly sophisticated constitutional views. Based on the history of Jerusalem, they viewed their kings as no more than the ‘first among equals’. Furthermore, they upheld the concept of government as a contract between the king and his subjects, requiring the consent of the ruled in the form of the High Court.
Historians have rightly pointed out that, as the struggle between the Hohenstaufen and the barons dragged on, the baronial faction became ever more creative in inventing laws and customs designed to undermine Hohenstaufen rule. This overlooks the fact that the emperor had already squandered all credibility by repeatedly breaking his word and behaving like a despot. The baronial opposition became increasingly desperate and inventive in finding the means to prevent a proven tyrant from gaining control of the kingdom. They were creative in finding legal pretexts for achieving that aim. Yet that should not obscure the fact that at the core of the baronial opposition to Frederick stood the belief in rule-of-law as opposed to rule-by-imperial-whim.
Frederick proved his contempt for the laws and constitution of Jerusalem within the first four years of his reign by the following actions: (1) refusing to recognise that his title to Jerusalem was derived through his wife rather than a divine right; (2) demanding the surrender of Beirut and nearly a dozen other lordships without due process; and (3) ignoring the High Court of Jerusalem and its functions, which included approving treaties.
Of these actions, the second has received the most attention because Frederick’s attempt to disseize the Lord of Beirut without due process was the spark that ignited the civil war. Because the Lord of Beirut was a highly respected, powerful and learned nobleman, the emperor’s arrogant, arbitrary and unconstitutional attempt to disseize him met with widespread outrage and, finally, armed opposition. Beirut rallied a majority of the kingdom – and not just the nobility, but the Genoese, Templars and commons of Acre – to his cause. After each bitter defeat, Frederick tried to find a means of placating the opposition, yet he refused to budge on the principle of his right to arbitrarily disseize lords without due process. To the end, he insisted that Beirut abdicate his lordship without due process. To the end, Beirut insisted on due process before surrendering anything.
Unfortunately, because the clash between Beirut and the emperor is the focus of a lively, colourful and detailed contemporary account by the jurist and philosopher Philip de Novare, most historians (if they look at the conflict at all) reduce the baronial resistance to a struggle over land and titles. This dramatically oversimplifies the opposition’s concerns and overlooks the other two constitutional principles that Frederick II blatantly violated.
The issue of where he derived his right to rule in Jerusalem surfaced first. As noted above, the very day after his wedding to Queen Yolanda of Jerusalem, Frederick demanded the lords of Jerusalem do homage to him as king in direct violation of the marriage agreement he had negotiated with his father-in-law, King John. Yet after Yolanda’s death, Frederick abruptly – and without a trace of shame or embarrassment – adopted Brienne’s position that his rule continued despite his wife’s demise. He refused to recognise his son by Yolanda as king of Jerusalem and continued calling himself by that title until the day he died. On his deathbed in December 1250, Frederick II bequeathed Italy, Germany and Sicily to Yolanda’s son Conrad. Still, he suggested that Conrad give the Kingdom of Jerusalem to his half-brother Henry, the son of his third wife, Isabella of England. This proves that Frederick utterly failed to acknowledge or accept that the crown of Jerusalem was not his to give away. It had derived from his wife and could only pass to her heirs and only with the consent of the High Court. Frederick’s attempt to give Jerusalem away to someone with no right to it was a final insult to the bride he neglected and possibly abused. It also demonstrates that to his last breath, he remained ignorant of or indifferent to the constitution of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Last but not least, in the general enthusiasm for Frederick’s ‘bloodless crusade’ of 1228–1229, historians and novelists generally overlook the fact that the constitution of Jerusalem gave the High Court the right to make treaties. Frederick II Hohenstaufen blissfully ignored this constitutional right when he secretly negotiated with the Sultan al Kamil and presented the High Court of Jerusalem with a fait accompli. This, as much as the seriously flawed terms of the treaty, outraged the local nobility.
Admirers of Frederick II appear to believe that constitutional concerns should not be allowed to inhibit a ‘genius’ who could ‘retake’ Jerusalem without any loss of life. Yet they conveniently forget that the kings and regents of Jerusalem had been making treaties with the Saracens for more than a hundred years before Frederick arrived. There was nothing exceptional, much less revolutionary, about making treaties with the Saracens. Frederick II did nothing inherently different from what every king of Jerusalem had done for the previous 128 years. The fact that his treaty included nominal control of Jerusalem for ten years did not make it exceptionally brilliant. It was a treaty doomed to failure; Richard of England had been too intelligent to fall into a similar trap by taking control of a city he would not be able to hold in the long run. Because Frederick II’s truce (not a treaty, but a temporary truce) left Jerusalem naked of every kind of defence, it left the city so vulnerable that none of the military orders bothered to move their headquarters back to the Holy City. Indeed, Frederick II’s terms were so terrible they led directly to the slaughter of some 40,000 Christians soon after the treaty expired.
The entire era of Hohenstaufen rule, including the reigns of Frederick’s son and grandson, was characterised by absentee rule. In the quarter-century in which Frederick II called himself king of Jerusalem, he spent only eight months in the Holy Land. Neither his son nor grandson ever set foot in the kingdom for a single day. Thus, from November 1225 until 28 October 1268, Jerusalem was ruled by various, sometimes competing, baillies, i.e., deputy regents, sometimes appointed by the distant Hohenstaufens and sometimes elected by the local barons. Such men could never exert the authority of a king, not even a weak king like John de Brienne. More than anything, this doomed the Kingdom of Jerusalem to annihilation.
This was not immediately apparent, however. Through clever exploitation of the rivalries between the various Ayyubid princes, the Franks had by 1244 managed to restore the borders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem almost to what they had been in 1187 before the catastrophe at Hattin. Unfortunately, that year, the kingdom allied itself with the losing side in squabble between two Ayyubid princes. As a result, a large part of the kingdom’s army was wiped out at the Battle of La Forbie on 11 July 1244. Fortunately, the victors were not jihadists, and the kingdom was not immediately overrun. Nevertheless, it was once again vulnerable.
Soon other external factors began to undermine the kingdom’s viability. Starting in 1250, the Ayyubids, with their practical interest in trade and economic development, were one after another murdered and replaced by fanatical Mamluks, who preferred to cut off their own sources of revenues rather than maintain mutually beneficial ties with their Christian neighbours. Meanwhile, the Mongols swept in from the Far East and were intent on subjugating the entire world with a level of brutality unprecedented in Europe.
By the time Hohenstaufen rule ended in 1268, the kingdom was beginning to unravel. The Genoese were openly at war with the Venetians in the streets of Acre. The Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights were at each other’s throats. The Mamluks had captured Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf, then Galilee, and in 1268, Jaffa. In the north, Antioch was overwhelmed in 1268 and subjected to slaughter and plunder on a scale comparable to the Mongol capture of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus eight years earlier.
Nor did the death of the last titular Hohenstaufen king pave the way for a better era. On the contrary, both Hugh III of Cyprus and Marie of Antioch laid claim to Jerusalem and vied for support. Yet neither was present in the kingdom. Marie eventually sold her claim to Charles of Anjou, the unscrupulous younger brother of King Louis IX of France. It was not until the death of Anjou in 1286 that the various factions in the kingdom could agree to crown Henry II of Cyprus as their king. By then, the kingdom existed in name only. Only a few cities along the coastline remained. Some of these, like the always quasi-independent Tripoli and the isolated Beirut, concluded independent treaties with the Mamluks to buy themselves time.
In April 1289, Tripoli fell, and two years later, on 6 April 1291, the Mamluk siege of Acre began. The greatest and wealthiest city of Outremer, once the rival of Alexandria and Constantinople, fell on 18 May. Sidon surrendered in June, Beirut in July, and the Templars voluntarily abandoned their last castles in the Levant, Tartus and Athlit, on 3 August and 14 August, respectively. The original crusader states were no more. Only the latecomer, Cyprus, remained.
It was merely a coincidence that this period of slow decay was also an era without queens or other notable female figures, with one exception noted in the next section. Although Frederick II remarried, his third wife had no claim to call herself queen of Jerusalem. In any case, she was confined to Frederick’s harem just as Yolanda had been, a slave more than a queen. Conrad I married Elizabeth of Bavaria in 1246, and technically, she had the right to the title of queen of Jerusalem. Yet, Conrad never travelled to his inherited kingdom, so neither he nor his wife was crowned or anointed there before his death in 1254. The claim to the title then passed to his infant son Conrad the Younger or Conradin, who was executed at the age of 16 by Charles of Anjou after an unsuccessful armed attempt to reclaim his parental inheritance of Sicily from the Frenchman. Conradin never married. Although Henry II of Cyprus was acclaimed and crowned king of Jerusalem in 1286, he was, at the time, 16 and unmarried, so no queen was crowned with him. He was still unmarried when Acre fell five years later, although he subsequently married Constance of Sicily.
Yet while Jerusalem rotted slowly away on the coast of the Levant, savaged by self-inflicted wounds and external forces, the last of the crusader states – the Kingdom of Cyprus – was prospering as never before. Here, the Lusignan dynasty was sinking deep roots.
Cyprus is roughly 3,500 square miles, 225 miles long and 95 miles wide. At the time of Richard the Lionheart’s invasion in 1191, the population was approximately 100,000 strong and composed mostly of Greek peasants. There was only a small ruling elite of Greek aristocrats, bureaucrats and clergy, and even smaller communities of foreigners, mostly Armenians, Maronites, Syrian Christians and Jews. A province of only secondary or tertiary importance to the Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, the economic base of Byzantine Cyprus was agriculture with small quantities of commodity exports.
Richard the Lionheart’s conquest leading to the establishment of the Lusignan dynasty in Cyprus two years later, initially had little or no impact on the economy. The conquest neither dislocated large numbers of people nor altered the structure of land tenure or the means of production. For the vast majority of the Cypriot rural population, the change in regime only meant that the landlords changed. Where once the landlords had been (often absentee) Greek aristocrats, after the establishment of Lusignan rule, they were Latin noblemen predominantly from the crusader states, also often absentee. These landlords now held their estates as feudal fiefs with obligations to the crown, but for the peasants, little changed. Likewise, imperial lands became part of the royal domain, but the tenants’ duties and dues remained the same.
What changed was the explosion in commercial activity in the wake of Frankish control of the island, which coincided with the loss of the interior of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin, followed by the recovery of the Levantine coast during the Third Crusade. Because the populous urban centres of the Levant remained in Christian hands while their rural hinterland fell to the Saracens, the inhabitants of these cities turned to Cyprus for imports. The demands of the mainland triggered a diversification of the Cypriot economy. Thus, in addition to its traditional agricultural products of wheat, barley and pulses, Cyprus began to produce and export carob, fish, meat, flax, cotton, onions and rice in quantity, along with minor exports of saffron, nutmeg, pepper and other spices, including salt. In addition, a shift away from raw agricultural products to agricultural processing began. Under the Lusignans, Cyprus produced and exported various processed agricultural goods such as wine, olive oil, wax, honey, soap, cheese and, above all, sugar. Indeed, sugar production on an industrial scale became one of Cyprus’ most important revenue sources.
Furthermore, under the Lusignans, Cyprus developed entire new industries. The manufacturing of pottery flourished at Paphos, Lemba, Lapithos and Engomi. Textile production is also documented from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, including samite, camlets and silk, and the textiles were often dyed locally, increasing the value-added captured on the island. Other examples of high-value export products were icons and manuscripts. Excavations also show that Cyprus employed the cutting-edge technologies of the age, notably highly sophisticated waterworks to power mills, followed by the reuse of this water to irrigate surrounding fields.31
The entire population benefitted from these changes, but none more so than the feudal elite and, above all, the crown. As much as one-third of Cyprus’ arable land belonged to the royal domain, and Lusignan control did not end there. The Lusignans were more Byzantine than Western in their tight control over the Cypriot economy, building on a system of centralised administration they inherited from Constantinople, which included Orthodox and Greek-speaking personnel. In contrast to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the kings of Cyprus maintained a monopoly on minting coins and established kingdom-wide standards for a variety of wares. They instituted selected price controls and maintained control of public highways. They granted far fewer privileges to the Italian city-states than the crusader states on the mainland. In addition, they fostered shipbuilding and financial services, two of the most lucrative economic sectors of the age.
Cyprus was set on this course by the competent Aimery de Lusignan. Aimery had assumed the lordship of Cyprus at the death of his brother Guy in 1194. At that time, he was already a mature man who had been married for roughly two decades to Eschiva d’Ibelin, the daughter of Baldwin of Ramla. The couple had six children – three sons and three daughters – three of whom died young. Eschiva died just before she and Aimery were to be crowned king and queen of Cyprus. Although she founded the dynasty that would rule Cyprus for almost 300 years, she never wore a crown.
Not long after her death, Aimery married Isabella of Jerusalem, becoming king of Jerusalem as well as king of Cyprus. At his death, this personal union of the kingdoms was dissolved. Isabella’s eldest daughter, Maria de Montferrat, succeeded to the crown of Jerusalem, while Aimery’s only surviving son by Eschiva, Hugh, ascended to the throne of Cyprus. The two monarchs were minors when they ascended their respective thrones. At his father’s death, Hugh was only 9 years old, while Maria was 13. Both required regents. As noted earlier, Maria’s uncle John d’Ibelin was selected as her regent, while in Cyprus, the High Court chose Walter de Montbéliard, the husband of Hugh’s eldest sister, Burgundia. The latter was also his heir apparent. The heir apparent in Jerusalem, on the other hand, was Alice, the sister of the queen and daughter of Isabella I, by her third husband, Henri de Champagne. She has gone down in history as Alice de Champagne and was undoubtedly an ambitious and influential figure who left a colourful mark in the history of thirteenth-century Outremer.
In 1210, Alice was escorted to Cyprus by her uncles John and Philip d’Ibelin, where she formally married Hugh de Lusignan and was crowned queen of Cyprus. She would have been roughly 17 years old at the time, while her husband Hugh was just 14. Shortly afterwards, Hugh assumed his majority – with a vengeance. He immediately accused his brother-in-law of embezzlement and exiled him outright or forced him to flee. In either case, Walter de Montbéliard quit the kingdom and went to the court of his cousin John de Brienne in Acre.
In 1217, at age 22, Hugh joined what we know as the Fifth Crusade. He led a contingent of Cypriot crusaders to the mainland, where they made incursions into Saracen territory preliminary at the start of the main crusade against Egypt. During the winter lull in the fighting, Hugh travelled north to attend the wedding of his half-sister Melisende, his father’s daughter by Isabella of Jerusalem, to Bohemond IV of Antioch. During the festivities, Hugh became ill and died on 10 January 1218.
He left behind two small daughters and an eight-month-old son, Henry. Alice de Champagne was a 25-year-old widow. By all accounts, she was immediately recognised by her vassals as the regent for her infant son. Yet, either at the advice of the High Court or in accordance with the dying king’s wishes – or possibly of her own accord – Alice publicly appointed her uncle Philip d’Ibelin as her baillie. Significantly, after all the liegemen did homage to Queen Alice as regent, she had the barons swear to obey Philip d’Ibelin ‘until her son Henry came of age’.32
According to the chronicles, the kingdom’s revenues largely went to Alice, who thereby controlled patronage, while the day-to-day business of administration and the critical task of leading the armies of Cyprus devolved to her appointed baillie, Philip d’Ibelin. However, by no means was Alice’s role passive or nominal. In 1220, Alice was actively involved in negotiating the settlement of a dispute between the Latin and Orthodox Churches in Cyprus. Meanwhile, Alice’s baillie Philip d’Ibelin rebuffed efforts by the Duke of Austria to disinherit the Lusignan kings altogether. The Austrian duke spuriously alleged that Cyprus was a part of the ransom Richard the Lionheart owed his family. In addition, Ibelin repelled an Ayyubid raid on Cyprus’ principal southern port of Limassol. Ships were burnt in the harbour, and allegedly 13,000 Cypriots were killed or captured. This was the first Arab attack on Cyprus in roughly 200 years and must have terrified the population and shaken the government under Ibelin, who very likely recalled vassals involved in the crusade in Egypt to defend Cyprus. Two years later, Cyprus was devastated by a severe earthquake, damaging three major cities, Nicosia, Limassol and Paphos. The latter was particularly ravaged, with the castle and much of the city levelled.
Perhaps the costs of rebuilding and repair caused by these calamities put Ibelin on a collision course with Queen Alice. Thirteenth-century historian Philip de Novare, an intimate and supporter of the House of Ibelin, claims that Alice spent money ‘freely’, implying irresponsibly.33 Another chronicle is even more specific, saying: ‘Queen Alice was very generous and spent the revenues of the kingdom liberally, and disposed of them entirely as seemed good to her’.34 Ibelin evidently disagreed about how the revenues should be spent and tried to curb the queen. Alice resented his interference, leading to a rupture between them.
The High Court sided decisively with Ibelin. In 1223, Queen Alice abandoned her three children and went into voluntary exile in Tripoli, but not with any intention of giving up the fight. On the contrary, there she married the eldest son of the Prince of Antioch, Bohemond V, with the probable aim of returning to Cyprus with Bohemond as her consort in order to dismiss Ibelin. Queen Alice’s plans foundered on a papal dissolution of her marriage to Bohemond based on consanguinity.
Alice next tried to outflank Ibelin by appointing a different baillie, a Cypriot lord by the name of Aimery Barlais. The High Court of Cyprus rejected Barlais’ claims by citing their oath to obey Ibelin until King Henry came of age. Meanwhile – and ominously – Alice faced opposition from a different and more powerful quarter. Namely, the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, rejected Alice’s right to be regent; he proclaimed his exclusive right to this position. As with his claim to be king of Jerusalem after his wife’s death and his attempt to force the Prince of Antioch to do homage to him, his presumption of the regency of Cyprus violated the constitution of the kingdom and the will of the High Court.
Indeed, despite Alice’s friction with Ibelin and the High Court of Cyprus, the barons of Cyprus (including Ibelin) remained loyal to her. When Frederick II tried to make them do homage to him, they refused on the grounds that they had already done homage to Alice, and she was the legal regent. As always, the legality of his position was of no interest to the autocratic emperor. Frederick II ignored Alice and the High Court and imperiously appointed his own baillies for Cyprus, five men whose rapaciousness soon led to bloodshed and the only instance of violence against Orthodox clergy in the history of Frankish Cyprus.
Just as Frederick II’s arrogance and disregard for the law had turned the Ibelins, the Prince of Antioch and the common citizens of Acre against him, his treatment of Alice pushed her into open rebellion as well. As soon as Frederick had sailed away (still drenched in the offal and innards the people of Acre had thrown at him as he walked down to his galley), Alice went before the High Court of Jerusalem and laid claim to the crown of Jerusalem. It was early May 1229.
Her reasoning was compelling and highly sophisticated. Queen Yolanda of Jerusalem had died on May 5, 1228. Her infant son, Conrad, was her heir apparent, and it was only as his regent that the barons of Jerusalem had submitted to Frederick II. However, Alice now pointed out, in accordance with the laws of the kingdom, the heir to a fief not resident in the domain was required to claim his inheritance within one year. A year had passed since Conrad had inherited his title, and he had not yet claimed it. In consequence, Alice argued, his claim had lapsed, and the next in line to the throne should be recognised as the rightful heir. After Conrad, Alice was the closest blood relative to the last queen, her niece Yolanda.
Alice’s legal reasoning was based on the laws of inheritance for fiefs and, up to this point, had not been applied to the crown itself, but her arguments could not be dismissed out of hand. The High Court sent word to Frederick II, informing him of the kingdom’s customs and demanding that he send Conrad east to enforce his claim. Frederick, of course, ignored the High Court as he always did. Yet while the emperor’s attitude inflamed anti-imperial sentiment in Outremer, it did nothing to help Alice. Instead, a full-scale civil war exploded in which Alice’s abandoned son, King Henry of Cyprus, played a prominent role on the side of the rebellious barons. He and his supporters (headed by the Ibelins) had no desire to complicate things by doing homage to a woman who had earlier tried to push an Ibelin from power – and possibly sought to depose her son as well. Alice had made the wrong enemies in 1223–24.
After her initiative had come to nothing, Alice turned her attention to an ultimately futile attempt to lay claim to her father’s County of Champagne in France. Then in 1239, a young nobleman in the king of Navarre’s entourage approached Alice and proposed (or accepted a proposal of) marriage. Alice was 47 years old, and her bridegroom, Ralph Count of Soissons, is thought to have been roughly half her age. Presumably, he was most attracted to her because she was the queen-mother of Cyprus and heir presumptive to Jerusalem since Conrad Hohenstaufen had no heirs of his body..
It is hard to imagine that what happened next was entirely coincidental. By 1243, the conflict between Frederick II and the leading rebels of Outremer had been frozen for roughly a decade. The emperor had lost all influence in Cyprus with the victory of King Henry over the Imperial Forces at the 1232 Battle of Agridi. On the mainland, Frederick’s baillie Richard de Filangieri held sway only in Tyre, while the rest of the kingdom recognised the baillies appointed by the High Court. In early 1243, the rebel barons were told there was disaffection in Tyre and that elements within the city would welcome them if they could liberate it from imperial control.
Suddenly, the legal advisors to the leading barons of the anti-imperial faction remembered that a minor king had just one year to claim his inheritance after coming of age. If he failed to do so, his right to exercise power lapsed. Since Conrad had come of age in 1242 (or some say 1243), Frederick II could no longer call himself regent and no longer had the right to appoint baillies. On the other hand, Conrad had no right to appoint baillies either, or at least not until he had come to the kingdom and been properly crowned and anointed. Instead of the absentee monarch, power in the kingdom, so the argument went, should be exercised by the king’s closest relative resident in Outremer, who would become monarch if the heir failed to appear within one year of coming of age. Conrad Hohenstaufen’s closest relative resident in Outremer was none other than Alice de Champagne.
At once a written agreement was drawn up in which the leaders of the baronial faction, Balian d’Ibelin of Beirut (the son of John d’Ibelin, the former regent of the kingdom), and Philip de Montfort, Lord of Toron, agreed to swear homage to Alice as regent of Jerusalem. She promised to invest the named lords with all the fortresses in the kingdom, that is, to delegate the defence of the realm to them. On 5 June, an assembly was held, attended not only by the members of the High Court but also representatives of the Catholic Church, the military orders and the Italian communes. Alice was formally invested as regent, and those present swore homage to her, starting with Balian of Beirut, the foremost baron in the Kingdom of Jerusalem at this time, followed by his cousin, Philip of Toron (a cousin of the English Earl of Leicester).
A week later, Beirut led a military assault on Tyre, slipping through a postern with a few men and opening the chain to the harbour to admit a fleet loyal to the barons. The Imperial Forces were driven back to the citadel and soon agreed to surrender. They were granted free passage out of the city and returned to Sicily to face the wrath of the Hohenstaufen. Ralph de Soissons immediately demanded the victors turn Tyre over to him in his capacity as regent-consort.
Beirut and Toron did not share his interpretation of his role as husband to the regent Alice. They could legitimately argue that they had been entrusted with the defence of the realm, which naturally included such a vital and nearly impregnable city as Tyre. Furthermore, as an immature newcomer from France who had not been held hostage and tortured by Frederick II as Balian of Beirut had been, nor fought in the vicious, violent phase of civil war from 1228–1232, Soissons was not taken seriously. The depth of Soisson’s feelings for Alice was made apparent when he immediately sailed for France, complaining loudly about his lack of power and the double-dealing and treachery of the barons of Outremer. This narrative reinforced the steady whining of Western chroniclers against the Franks resident in the Holy Land. Alice, however, did not join her husband. Nor does she appear to have shared his indignation. She remained where she was enjoying the revenues and, when Conrad as expected failed to put in an appearance, the title as well of reigning queen of Jerusalem. She was the last of the powerful royal women of Outremer.