Latin patriarch of Jerusalem (1180-1190/1191).
Eraclius was probably born in the 1120s in the Auvergne; he may have been descended from the family of the viscounts of Polignac. After having (probably) taken a master’s degree and studied law with Stephen of Tournai at Bologna, he was appointed as archdeacon of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (1169-1175) and archbishop of Caesarea (1175-1180), with the support of Agnes of Courtenay. Along with William, archbishop of Tyre, and six other ecclesiastical dignitaries, Eraclius represented the Latin Church of Palestine at the Third Lateran Council in October 1178. He was elected patriarch on 16 October 1180, again with decisive support from Agnes of Courtenay. The unsuccessful candidate was William of Tyre, a factor that is significant, in that many of the negative judgements of Eraclius are based on the testimony of William’s chronicle and its Old French continuations.
In 1180-1181, on behalf of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, Eraclius mediated between Prince Bohemund III of Antioch and the Latin patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges. In the internal politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Eraclius took the part of the magnate faction around Agnes of Courtenay, whose influence helped bring about the appointment of Guy of Lusignan as regent of the kingdom in 1183. Three years later it was Eraclius, in collusion with the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers, who managed the coronation of the princess Sibyl and her husband Guy of Lusignan as queen and king of Jerusalem (1186). Before this, in order to seek assistance for Outremer against the growing threat from Saladin, Eraclius had been sent to the West (1184-1185), where he met Pope Lucius III, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Henry II of England. During the disastrous campaign against Saladin that culminated in the battle of Hattin (3-4 July 1187), Eraclius remained in Jerusalem; he was held responsible for the loss of Outremer and the relic of the True Cross in many contemporary Western sources.
In the summer of 1188, Eraclius went to Antioch, but by August 1189 he was in the camp of Guy of Lusignan when the latter started to besiege Acre. The patriarch died during the siege, probably in late autumn 1190.
-Klaus-Peter Kirstein
See also: Jerusalem, (Latin) Kingdom of
Bibliography
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Hamilton, Bernard, The Latin Church in the Crusader States: The Secular Church (London: Variorum, 1980), pp. 79-85.
Jaspert, Nikolas, “Zwei unbekannte Hilfsersuchen des Patriarchen Eraclius vor dem Fall Jerusalems (1187),”
Deutsches Archivfur Erforschung des Mittelalters 60 (2004), 483-516.
Kedar, Benjamin Z., “The Patriarch Eraclius,” in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem Presented to Joshua Prawer, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans Eberhard Mayer, and Raymond Charles Smail (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1982), pp. 177-204.
Kirstein, Klaus-Peter, Die lateinischen Patriarchen von Jerusalem (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002).
Murray, Alan V., “Mighty Against the Enemies of Christ: The Relic of the True Cross in the Armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. John France and William G. Zajac (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 217-238.
Phillips, Jonathan, Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119-1187 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
World History
