Guido of Lusignan

This article is about Guido von Lusignan, King of Jerusalem and Cyprus. For other people with this name, see Guido von Lusignan (disambiguation) .

Guido of Lusignan. Romanticized portrait in the Palace of Versailles . Painter: François-Édouard Picot around 1845.

Guido von Lusignan (French: Guy de Lusignan ; † 1194 ) was a western French nobleman from the House of Lusignan . In the Holy Land he became King of Jerusalem and later King of Cyprus by marriage .

As king of Jerusalem he led the empire to the defeat at Hattin , through which the city of Jerusalem was lost to Sultan Saladin in 1187 .

Life

Guido was a younger son of the crusader Hugo VIII von Lusignan and his wife Bourgogne, a daughter of Gottfried I von Rancon . His brothers were Hugo , Gottfried and Amalrich , who are also historically prominent representatives of the family.

Career in the Holy Land

Guido reached the Middle East in the 1170s. In 1180 King Baldwin IV , who was marked by leprosy, arranged for his sister Sibylle to marry Guido and made him Count of Jaffa and Ascalon and Bailli of Jerusalem . Guido soon began to fight with his wife Sibylle against Baldwin and his regent Raimund III. Ally Count of Tripoli . In 1182 he got Baldwin IV to appoint him regent and in 1183 to resign in favor of Sibylle's little son Baldwin V. Raimund III. was initially regent for Baldwin V, but Guido was able to take over this position himself. When Baldwin V died in 1186, Guido claimed the throne (based on the inheritance rights of his wife Sibylle) for himself. With Sibylle he had two daughters, Alice and Marie, but they died young.

King of Jerusalem

The battle of Hattin. Saladin snatches the holy cross from the fleeing King Guido. Medieval illustration from the Chronica majora de Matthew Paris , 13th century.

Guido came to power when the Ayyubid Sultan Saladin began his successful attacks on the kingdom. Many of the descendants of the first Crusaders who grew up in the kingdom wanted to make peace with Saladin, but the newcomers like Guido and Rainald of Chatillon sought battle. Rainald provoked Saladin by raiding trade caravans even when there was peace between the kingdom and the sultan. In 1186 Saladin responded with an invasion aimed at retaking Jerusalem from the Christians. In 1187, against Raimund's advice, Guido tried to lift Saladin's siege of Tiberias ; Guido's army was surrounded and cut off from the water. On July 4, 1187, the kingdom's army was completely wiped out at the Battle of Hattin ; Guido was captured.

As a result, Jerusalem and most of the kingdom fell to Saladin. One exception was Tire , who was defended by another newcomer, namely Conrad von Montferrat . In 1187, Guido was released in exchange for the surrender of the fortress town of Askalon to Saladin without a fight . When Sibylle died in 1190, Guido lost his claim to the throne. Konrad, who married Sibylle's younger sister Isabella , now claimed his place. However, Guido maintained his claim to the throne, in which he was strengthened by the English King Richard the Lionheart , who was in the country with the Third Crusade . The French and German crusade participants as well as the local nobility supported Konrad. Finally, in April 1192, Conrad was elected king in place of Guido by the barons and prelates of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Lord of Cyprus

Richard, who had conquered the island of Cyprus on the way to the Holy Land , sold it to Guido in May 1192 to get him out of the internal disputes in Palestine . Guido then gave up his claim to the throne of Jerusalem and became the first ruler of the Kingdom of Cyprus . He died in 1194 and was buried in the Templar Church of Nicosia . After his death, his brother Amalrich succeeded him as ruler of Cyprus, who in 1197 also regained the crown of Jerusalem. His descendants ruled the island until 1474, when the last male descendant of the family, Jacob III. , died as a minor.

literature

• Hans Eberhard Mayer : History of the Crusades. (= Kohlhammer-Urban pocket books. Vol. 86). 10th, completely revised and expanded edition. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-17-018679-5 .
• Hannes Möhring : Saladin. The Sultan and His Time, 1138–1193. Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-50886-3 .
• Peter W. Edbury (Ed.): The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade. Sources in Translation (= Crusade Texts in Translation. Vol. 1). Reprinted edition. Ashgate, Aldershot et al. 2004, ISBN 1-84014-676-1 .
• Steven Runciman : History of the Crusades. 4th edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-423-30175-9 .
• Peter W. Edbury: The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusaders, 1191-1374. Reprinted edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2000, ISBN 0-521-26876-1 .
• Bernard Hamilton: The Leper King and his heirs. Baldwin IV and the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2000, ISBN 0-521-64187-X .
• Adolf Waas : History of the Crusades. Volume 2. Herder, Freiburg (Breisgau) 1956.
• René Grousset : The Hero's Song of the Crusades. Klipper, Stuttgart 1951.

Web links

Commons : Guido von Lusignan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Guy de Lusignan at fmg.ac (English)

predecessor	Office	successor
William of Montferrat	Count of Jaffa and Ascalon 1180–1186	Crown domain
Baldwin IV (King)	Bailli of Jerusalem 1180–1182	Raimund III. from Tripoli
Balduin V.	King of Jerusalem (de iure uxoris , with Sibylle ) 1186–1190	Konrad (de iure uxoris , with Isabella I. )
Knights Templar	King of Cyprus 1192–1194	Amalrich I.