Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Cyprus
- Map 2 The eastern Mediterranean
- 1 Conquest
- 2 Settlement
- 3 The Lusignan dynasty
- 4 The house of Ibelin
- 5 The defence of Latin Syria
- 6 The reign of Henry II
- 7 Dynastic politics, commerce and crusade, 1324–69
- 8 Kingship and government
- 9 Climacteric
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The house of Ibelin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Map 1 Cyprus
- Map 2 The eastern Mediterranean
- 1 Conquest
- 2 Settlement
- 3 The Lusignan dynasty
- 4 The house of Ibelin
- 5 The defence of Latin Syria
- 6 The reign of Henry II
- 7 Dynastic politics, commerce and crusade, 1324–69
- 8 Kingship and government
- 9 Climacteric
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The ibelin family was the most prominent noble house in Cyprus during the centuries of Lusignan rule. Its pre-twelfth-century origins are unknown: a tradition found in an early fourteenth-century source linked the family with the viscounts of Chartres, but this claim cannot stand critical scrutiny, and onomastic evidence points to a presumably less exalted Italian background, perhaps in Pisa or Sardinia. The founder of the Ibelin's fortunes in the East was a certain Barisan or Balian ‘the Elder’, who by the second decade of the twelfth century had become castellan of Jaffa. In the early 1140s King Fulk granted him the castle and lordship of Ibelin (the modern Yavne) to hold as a fief in the county of Jaffa. Marriage to an heiress brought Barisan another important fief in the same county, the lordship of Ramla, and thereafter he and his descendants were numbered among the leading barons in the kingdom of Jerusalem. In the next generation Barisan's three sons, Hugh, Baldwin and Balian, came to the fore. Balian advanced the family's standing still further when in 1177 he married Maria Comnena, the widow of King Amaury of Jerusalem and the mother of the future Queen Isabella I (1192–1205). So by the end of the twelfth century, with Balian's two sons by Maria the half-brothers of the then queen, the Ibelins' lasting pre-eminence in the kingdom of Jerusalem was assured.
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- Information
- The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191–1374 , pp. 39 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991