“Scandalia … tam in oriente quam in occidente”: The Briennes in East and West, 1213–1221

Abstract

John of Brienne (king of Jerusalem, 1210-25) was the last king of Jerusalem to habitually reside in any part of the Latin East until the Lusignans of Cyprus succeeded the Hohenstaufen in 1269. By then, the kingdom would be tottering towards its final elimination, and the kingship, especially, would be but a shadow of its former self. And no king of Jerusalem after John would ever again regard that kingdom as his primary base: the Hohenstaufen and Charles of Anjou were based in the West, the Lusignans on Cyprus. If these are principal reasons for taking an interest in John's reign, then we can narrow down the period in which we are most concerned still further. John spent almost two-thirds of his reign outside his kingdom proper, thereby initiating a trend which was to reach the level of absentee kingship in the next generation. He spent most of 1218-21 in Egypt, trying to lead the Fifth Crusade; he then passed almost all the remainder of his reign, 1222-25, in the Latin West, trying to drum up support for a new crusade once the Fifth Crusade had failed. Thus, the final lengthy period of rule by any king of Jerusalem essentially based and resident in that kingdom was the opening seven years of King John's reign, 1210-17. This, then, is a time well worth examining in detail.Despite its significance, this is a very neglected age in the history of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Such detailed analyses as we have in fact struggle to find very much to say. 1 The main reason for this is the scarcity of extant source material for this particular period of Jerusalemite history. Comparatively speaking, a fair number of the Jerusalemite acta issued at this time have survived; but, as Peter Edbury has noted, "it is unfortunate that the narrative accounts [we have] shed almost no light at all on the politics of the kingdom of Jerusalem between [John's] accession in 1210 and the beginning of the Fifth Crusade in 1217." 2 The narrative accounts that Edbury is referring to here are what he now labels as "Ernoul-Bernard" and "Colbert-Fontainebleau": both these naratives pass swiftly from John's coronation through to the Fifth Crusade. 3 Relatively recently, however, some notable efforts have been made to fill this gap. Hans Mayer eased the task by exposing forgeries