According to the chronicles, the kingdom’s revenues largely went to Alice, who therefore controlled patronage, while the day-to-day business of administration and the critical task of leading the armies of Cyprus devolved upon her appointed baillie, Philip d’Ibelin. By no means was Alice’s role passive or nominal. In 1220, Alice was actively involved in mediating a dispute between the Latin and Orthodox churches in Cyprus. The pope had designated Cardinal Pelagius, the leader of the Fifth Crusade, to resolve the issue; he wanted the Orthodox bishops removed and the land turned over to the Latin Church. Queen Alice actively supported the interests of the Orthodox Church, enabling a compromise that allowed most Orthodox bishops to remain in place, albeit as nominal suffragans of their Latin colleagues. She also insisted that the Orthodox clergy be excused from paying taxes or performing labour services. Unfortunately, the pope was displeased with the agreement, and negotiations were reopened in 1222, leading to renewed frictions.
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 agreed to pay his family. In addition, Ibelin repelled an Ayyubid raid on Cyprus’ principal southern port of Limassol, during which ships were burnt in the harbour, and as many as 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 likely recalled vassals then involved in the crusade in Egypt to defend Cyprus. Two years later, Cyprus was devastated by a severe earthquake that damaged 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 strained the Cypriot treasury and put Ibelin on a collision course with Queen Alice. The thirteenth-century historian Philip de Novare, an intimate and supporter of the House of Ibelin, claims that Alice spent money ‘freely’, implying irresponsibly.105 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’.106 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 apparent aim of returning to Cyprus with Bohemond as her consort in order to dismiss Ibelin.
News of her intentions alarmed the barons of Cyprus. According to Novare, the barons feared that Bohemond, heir to an independent principality, would not be willing to recognise the minor Lusignan king as his sovereign. In short, the barons suspected Antioch was planning to depose Henry de Lusignan in favour of his dynasty. Whether such fears were justified or not is moot. Queen Alice’s plans, whatever they were, 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 disaffected Cypriot lord by the name of Aimery Barlais. The High Court of Cyprus rejected Barlais’ claim to the regency 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. The emperor rejected Alice’s right to be regent, proclaiming his exclusive right to the 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 was vehemently opposed by the High Court of Cyprus.
Indeed, despite Alice’s frictions with Ibelin and the High Court of Cyprus, the barons of Cyprus (including Ibelin) remained nominally 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. Frederick II was not interested in the legality of his claims; he ignored Alice and the High Court and 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 to lay claim to the crown of Jerusalem. It was early May 1229.
Her reasoning was cogent and highly sophisticated. Queen Yolanda of Jerusalem died on May 5, 1228. Her infant son, Conrad, was her successor, and it was only as regent to Conrad that the barons of Jerusalem had submitted to Frederick II. However, Alice now pointed out, in accordance with the laws of the kingdom, whoever inherited a fief while not resident in the domain must return to claim their inheritance within one year. A year had now passed since Conrad had inherited his title, and he had not yet come to claim it. In consequence, Alice argued, his claim had lapsed, and the next in line to the throne should be recognised as the rightful ruler of Jerusalem. 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 time, had not been applied to the crown itself but her arguments could not be dismissed out of hand. The High Court informed Frederick II of the kingdom’s customs and demanded 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 tried to push an Ibelin from power – and possibly depose her own son earlier. Alice had made the wrong enemies in 1223–24.
Alice, however, was nothing if not tenacious. Since her regency in Cyprus ended when her son Henry came of age in May 1232, she decided it was time to press her claims to the Counties of Champagne and Brie in France. Her claims were based on the fact that when her father, Henri de Champagne, had set out on crusade in 1190, he had been a bachelor without children. Fearing he might die on the dangerous crusade, Henri had designated his brother Theobald as his heir in the event he never returned and died without heirs. As it turned out, Henri never returned from his crusade, but not because he died. Instead, he had been persuaded to marry Isabella of Jerusalem and remain in Outremer. Although he died young and unexpectedly in 1197, he was not without heirs. On the contrary, he had three daughters by Isabella, the eldest of whom was Alice.
When word reached France of the Count of Champagne’s death, the king of France ignored Henri’s three daughters (we will never know whether it was because they were so far away or because they were girls) and invested Henri’s brother Theobald III with the County of Champagne. By 1233, when Alice decided to go to France and demand her father’s county, it was thirty-six years since her father had fallen to his death. His brother, too, was long since dead and buried, and Alice’s cousin, Theobald IV, was a grown man who had held the county nearly all his life. Yet he was aware of Alice’s claims.
Many years earlier, Alice’s younger sister Philippa and her husband Erard de Brienne had laid claim to Champagne. At the time, Theobald IV was still a minor, and his mother Blanche had been his regent. To protect her son’s inheritance, Blanche alleged that both Alice and Philippa were illegitimate because their mother (Isabella I of Jerusalem) was still legally married to Humphrey de Toron at their birth. This made her marriage to Champagne bigamous and, thus, null and void, and all issue from it illegitimate. Blanche trotted out French crusaders and clerics who all swore profusely to the perfidy of Conrad the Montferrat, all the barons of Jerusalem and, especially, Maria Comnena, whose ‘Greek filth’ corrupted everything under the sun. These ‘witnesses’ were produced for one purpose only: to ensure Blanche’s son did not lose his inheritance, Champagne. That they denigrated the leading lords of Outremer and blithely dismissed as bastards all the rulers of Jerusalem since Isabella, including the current king of Cyprus (not to mention confusing and distorting the historical record) was of no account to Blanche or her witnesses.
When Alice returned to France to lay her claim, her cousin trotted out the old arguments and ‘testimony’. The pope was asked to rule on the validity of Isabella’s marriage to Champagne without access to contemporary documentation or witnesses from the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At this point, Louis IX intervened. Although he had not yet taken the cross, his concern for the Holy Land was sufficient for him to oppose any judgement that might disrupt the ruling dynasties in the remaining crusader states. He persuaded Alice to renounce her claims in exchange for the payment of the considerable sum of 40,000 livres Tours and an annuity from estates yielding 2,000 livres annually. Alice returned to Outremer substantially wealthier than when she had left. She appears to have been content – for the moment.
Nothing more was heard about her until late 1239 when a young nobleman in the entourage of her erstwhile rival, Theobald IV of Champagne (now king of Navarre as well), proposed (or accepted a proposal of) marriage; it is not clear which of the pair took the initiative. By this time 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 by the fact that she was queen-mother of Cyprus and still the heir presumptive to Jerusalem since Conrad Hohenstaufen had no heirs yet.
It is hard to imagine that subsequent events were entirely coincidental. 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 Battle of Agridi in 1232. 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 that there was disaffection in Tyre and 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 (some say 1243), his father, Frederick II, could no longer call himself regent and no longer had the right to appoint baillies (e.g., Filangieri). 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. The argument went that instead of the absentee monarch, power in the kingdom should be exercised by the king’s closest relative resident in Outremer. In this case, that was 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 summoned and attended by members of the High Court, representatives of the 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. He was followed by his cousin Philip of Toron, a cousin of the English Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort.
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 they had been entrusted with the defence of the realm and that task ‘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), nor fought in the vicious and violent phase of civil war from 1228–1232, Soissons was not taken seriously. Beirut and Toron flatly refused to surrender Tyre to Soissons.
Soisson immediately demonstrated the depth of his feelings for Alice by setting sail for France. There he complained bitterly about his lack of power and the double-dealing and treachery of the barons of Outremer. This narrative reinforced the prejudices of Western chroniclers against the Franks resident in the Holy Land. The natives of Outremer had long been viewed by West Europeans as excessively luxury-loving. They notoriously preferred baths to battles, and were suspected of being soft on the Greeks and Saracens.
Strikingly, Alice did not join her husband. Moreover, she does not even appear to have shared his indignation. She took control of the kingdom’s revenues. She actively revoked appointments and grants made by Frederick II, whether at her behest or because it was the will of the High Court is unclear. She effectively regained the position she had held in Cyprus following the death of her first husband, King Hugh. While she enjoyed the status and revenues of regent, the real power in the kingdom lay with an Ibelin baron.
Nevertheless, while Alice never attained absolute power, she was anything but passive or helpless. Alice was bright, ambitious, educated and tenacious. She repeatedly seized the initiative and sought to bend others to her will. She actively impacted the history of her times, albeit not always to her benefit or credit. Yet she was unquestionably taken seriously and accorded respect by the men around her.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that a different woman with, perhaps, less pride and more charm would have been able to convert her acknowledged legal status into a position of yet greater influence. Abandoning her kingdom and her son when she clashed with her baillie and the High Court of Cyprus over finances was an unwise decision. Marrying a young French adventurer who did nothing to improve her legal status and alienated her barons was another ill-advised move. If Alice had allied with the Ibelins during the constitutional crisis of 1229, they might have opted to exploit her undeniable status as the resident heir apparent. They might have proclaimed her regent of Jerusalem immediately. She could have become a vital counterweight and rallying point to Hohenstaufen’s power. With a husband chosen from among the local barony, she could have given the kingdom what it needed most: a resident ruler dedicated to the welfare and defence of the Franks in the Near East.
Constance of Antioch, Ruling Princess of Antioch (b. 1128–d. 1163)
Constance was born an heiress and refused to be cowed into marrying a man she did not choose. Yet, while she got her way in marriage, her chosen husband proved the more dominant personality. In short, Constance became a victim of her poor judgement.
Constance, the heiress to the Principality of Antioch, was born in 1128. She was the daughter of Queen Melisende’s sister Alice and Alice’s husband, Bohemond II of Antioch. Constance’s father was killed in 1130, making her heiress to the principality at the age of 2 – long before she could consent to marriage. Although her mother initially acted as her regent, as described above power soon devolved to the kings of Jerusalem acting in consort with the High Court of Antioch.
In 1136, that body selected Raymond de Poitiers, the younger brother of the Duke of Aquitaine, as Constance’s husband, and he came out to the Near East armed with a papal dispensation to marry the 8-year-old Constance. The issue of consent was brushed aside for dynastic reasons, and Constance was duly married to the much older Raymond. The marriage lasted thirteen years until 1149, when Raymond de Poitiers died fighting against Nur adDin in the Battle of Inab. Constance was left a widow at 21 with four young children, including a 5-year-old son, Bohemond III. The latter succeeded to the principality, but, as a minor, could not yet rule. Constance, unlike her mother, was recognised as regent without dissent and assumed this role.
After her year of mourning, the king of Jerusalem, Constance’s cousin Baldwin III, urged her ‘repeatedly’ (according to William of Tyre) to take a new husband. Tyre goes on to note that ‘there were in the land at that time a number of noble and distinguished men … [anyone of whom] seemed with justice quite capable of protecting the region’.107 He carefully listed three candidates, along with their qualities and bloodlines, to show that they were worthy consorts for the Princess of Antioch. However, as Tyre says: ‘The princess … dreaded the yoke of marriage and preferred a free and independent life. She paid little heed to the needs of her people and was far more interested in enjoying the pleasures of life’.108
While Tyre’s opinion of Constance’s motives may be biased, the more important point is that the king singularly failed to convince – or coerce – Constance to take one of his ‘suitable’ candidates. Indeed, he summoned what Tyre called a ‘General Council’ at Tripoli and sent for Constance’s aunts, Queen Melisende and Countess Hodierna of Tripoli. Yet, as Tyre laments, ‘neither the king nor the count, her kinsmen, neither the queen nor the countess of Tripoli, her two aunts, was able to induce her to yield and thus provide for herself and her land’.109
Then, three years later, in 1153, Constance finally married for a second time; a man of her choosing. She chose the soon-to-be notorious adventurer, Reynald de Châtillon. It is hard to imagine this marriage was entirely harmonious as Châtillon notoriously abused his power as Prince Consort of Antioch. In the eight years between his marriage to Constance and his capture by Nur ad-Din’s forces in 1161, Châtillon engaged in some of the most nefarious activities recorded in the crusader states. These included the imprisonment and torture of the Patriarch of Antioch and a raid on the Christian island of Cyprus, during which his troops committed many atrocities. His actions were so notorious that King Baldwin III conveyed to Emperor Manuel I Comnenus that he would not stand in the way of a Byzantine expedition of retribution. Recognizing he was trapped, Châtillon submitted to the Byzantine Emperor, as William of Tyre describes it:
He is said to have appeared before the emperor barefooted and clothed in a woollen tunic short to the elbows, with a rope around his neck and a naked sword in his hand. Holding this by the point, he presented the hilt to the emperor. As soon as he had surrendered the sword, he threw himself on the ground at the emperor’s feet, where he lay prostrate till all were disgusted and the glory of the Latins was turned to shame; for he was a man of violent impulses, both in sinning and in repenting.110
Missing in the descriptions of Châtillon’s misdeeds is any mention of his wife. We hear neither that she approved nor disapproved. Tyre, our principal source, may well have felt that having refused to marry more suitable candidates when offered them, she had ‘made her bed and must now lie in it’.
Yet no sooner was Châtillon deep in a Saracen dungeon than Constance again tried to take control of her inheritance. Unfortunately for her, her son Bohemond III, was already 15 and deemed of age according to the laws of the crusader states. Bohemond, rather than Constance, was recognised as the legal ruler of Antioch by King Baldwin III. Constance attempted to override this decision by taking her case to the Byzantine Emperor, the acknowledged overlord of Antioch, after Châtillon’s submission to him earlier. The emperor sent ambassadors back to Antioch, who appear to have temporarily bolstered Constance’s position – at least for as long as they remained in Antioch. They departed after negotiating a marriage between Constance’s daughter (Bohemond’s sister) Maria and Emperor Manuel. Shortly afterwards, however, Bohemond III with the backing of his barons compelled Constance to leave the principality. This suggests she had made herself unpopular, most probably by her second marriage and/or her appeal to the ever unpopular Byzantine Emperor. She died of unknown causes soon afterwards and before the release of Châtillon from Saracen captivity.
Like her mother, Alice, Constance was handicapped in her play for power by her sex because the barons of Antioch wanted (and legitimately needed) a fighting man at their head. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that Alice blundered in choosing Châtillon as her consort, but he may well have seemed an ideal candidate at the time. He certainly proved to be a courageous and hard-bitten fighting man, even if his ethics and judgement left much to be desired. The fate of Constance, like that of her mother and Alice de Champagne, demonstrates that legal rights alone did not ensure the exercise of power.
Eschiva d’Ibelin, Lady of Cyprus (b. ca. 1165–d. 1196 or 1197)
Although Eschiva d’Ibelin never wore a crown, she was the founder of a dynasty that ruled Cyprus for roughly 300 years. Eschiva was married to a landless adventurer as a child and ended up married to a king without changing husbands. While we know very little about her, what we do know hints at a vital role during a critical juncture in history.
Eschiva was the daughter of Baldwin d’Ibelin, who held the barony of Ramla and Mirabel by right of his wife, Richildis. Eschiva’s birthdate is not recorded, but she must have been born about 1165 and had one sister, Stephanie. The Ibelins’ comparatively low rank at this time is illustrated by the fact that Stephanie married Amaury, viscount of Nablus (i.e., a household official, not a lord), while Eschiva was married to a landless adventurer from France, Aimery de Lusignan. Aimery was the third son of the French Lord de la March, and he married Eschiva before his brother Guy came to Jerusalem and seduced his way to a crown.
Eschiva was probably already married when her father distinguished himself at the Battle of Montgisard in 1177, an event which appears to have gone to his head and sparked new ambitions. In that same year but months before the battle, the heiress of Jerusalem, Sibylla, had been widowed, and rumours soon started to circulate that Baldwin of Ramla hoped to marry her. Of course, that was only possible if Baldwin could rid himself of the wife he already had, Richildis, the mother of his two daughters. This he successfully did, although no grounds for the divorce are given in the surviving records.
Furthermore, the divorce did not bring him the desired results. Princess Sibylla was instead betrothed to the far more powerful and prestigious Duke of Burgundy. Ramla consoled himself with a marriage to the daughter of the Lord of Caesarea, Elizabeth Gotman. Two years later, however, she was dead, and Baldwin’s ambitions again turned towards Sibylla. He may have had some form of encouragement from Sibylla herself because when he found himself in Saracen captivity in the summer of 1179, Saladin felt he could ask a king’s ransom for Ramla’s release. Presumably, the sultan had heard rumours that Ramla was about to marry the heir apparent to Jerusalem’s throne and would one day be king consort. Furthermore, the Byzantine Emperor agreed to pay a large portion of that ransom apparently likewise on the assumption that Baldwin of Ramla would become king of Jerusalem in due time.
