Amalric of Montfort (d. 1241)

Duke of Narbonne (1218-1241), earl of Leicester (12181239), and constable of France (1230-1241).

Amalric was the eldest son of Simon of Montfort, who had been elected military leader of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). After his father’s death during the siege of Toulouse (1218), Amalric inherited the lands Simon had conquered in southern France, along with the leadership of a crusading army, which melted away at forty-day intervals. Before and after the demise of an eastern crusade that diverted recruits and funding from the Albigensian Crusade, Pope Honorius III urged King Philip II Augustus of France and his son Louis VIII to aid Amalric and reassigned funds originally intended for the eastern crusade to subsidize Amalric’s increasingly mercenary army. Nevertheless, Amalric’s gradual loss of territory to Count Raymond VII of Toulouse and other southern noblemen remained largely unstemmed by Louis Vlll’s desultory crusading expedition in 1219. Despite Honorius’s attempts to organize a new crusade in the early 1220s, an increasingly bankrupt Amalric sought to cede his lands in southern France to Louis VIII. In 1226, he succeeded in his goal when Louis VIII once again took the crusade vow. Amalric played a leading role in the king’s triumphant military tour of Languedoc, although Louis’s death in 1226 meant the resumption of the negotiations that led to the Peace of Paris in 1229. By 1239, the debt-ridden Amalric had formalized the cession of his claims to the earldom of Leicester to his younger brother, the infamous future rebel Simon (the Younger) of Mont-fort. Amalric’s services to Louis VIII earned him high favor with Louis IX, who subsidized his participation in the Crusade of 1239-1241. Captured by Muslim forces in Gaza in 1239, Amalric died in Otranto, Italy, while returning to France in 1241.

-Jessalynn Bird

See also: Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229); Simon of Montfort (c. 1160-1218)

Bibliography

Maddicott, John R., Simon de Montfort (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Sivery, Gerard, Louis VIII le Lion (Paris: Fayard, 1995).

Sumption, Jonathan, The Albigensian Crusade (London:

Faber, 1978).