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.
Jerusalem Again Without a Queen: The Absentee Kings 1228–1268
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.
The Regent: Alice de Champagne in Cyprus and Jerusalem
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.
