LUSIGNAN

. The castle of Lusignan, near Poitiers, which was fortified ca. 950, gave its name to a family whose members were to become kings of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Lesser Armenia (Cilicia), as well as counts of La Marche and Angouleme. Situated where Poitou, Saintonge, Angoumois, and the Limousin meet, the Lusignan holdings, although nominally subject to the counts of Poitiers (later dukes of Aquitaine), offered the family opportunities to rise to political prominence during the 11th and 12th centuries.

Three sons of Hugues VIII achieved particular importance. In 1180, Gui de Lusignan married the heiress of the the kingdom of Jerusalem, and he ruled that crusader state from 1185 to 1192 despite losing the capital after the disastrous Battle of Hattim in 1187. Richard the Lionhearted, during the Third Crusade, compensated Gui for the loss of Jerusalem by giving him the newly conquered island of Cyprus, to which his brother Amaury succeeded in 1194. The Lusignans retained Cyprus, but the title of king of Jerusalem passed to the Hohenstaufen family between 1205 and 1268 following the marriage of the heiress, Isabelle (Gui’s stepdaughter), to the emperor Frederick II.

In France, the third brother, Hugues IX, had become count of La Marche and sought to join it to Angouleme by betrothing his son and heir, Hugues X, to Isabelle, heiress of Angouleme. This plan was disrupted when Hugues’s lord, John, king of England and duke of Aquitaine, married Isabelle himself in 1200, triggering the celebrated conflict that culminated in the seizure of John’s French fiefs by Philip II Augustus. After John’s death in 1216, Hugues finally did marry Isabelle. Their sons, the unpopular half-brothers of Henry III of England, were resented by the English barons, while the refusal of the Lusignans to render homage to Louis IX’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers was a source of Anglo-French conflict in Aquitaine until the defeat of Henry III at Taillebourg in 1242. The turbulent Lusignan family finally sold their rights to La Marche and Angouleme to Philip IV in 1303.

Their cousins ruled Cyprus until 1474 and Lesser Armenia until 1375, while regaining the virtually empty title of king of Jerusalem in 1268. Although Acre was lost in 1291 and Armenia conquered by the Mamluks of Egypt in 1375, the Lusignans in Cyprus maintained these titles in the vain hope that the crusading movement would be revived.

R. Thomas McDonald

[See also: ARRAS, JEAN D’]

Garaud, Marcel. Les chatelains de Poitou et 1 ’avinement du regime feodale, Xle et Xlle siecles.

Poitiers: Societe des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, 1967. lorga, Nicolae. Breve histoire de la Petite Armenie. Paris: Gamber, 1930.

Poute de Puybaudet, G. Etude sur les sires de Lusignan de Hugues ler a Hugues VIII (Xe siecle-1177). Positions des theses. Paris: Ecole des Chartes, 1896.

Runciman, Steven. A History ofthe Crusades. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951-54.

Setton, Kenneth M., ed. A History ofthe Crusades. 2nd ed. 5 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-89.