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Henry shared the historical stage with some of the most colorful and impressive figures of medieval history — Emperor Frederick II, John the “Old Lord” of Beirut, and King Louis IX of France, a Saint. These giants have dwarfed him, and he is largely forgotten or dismissed as unimportant. Yet under his reign, his island kingdom enjoyed peace and prosperity. He fostered trade, defended the rights of his diverse subjects, and avoided squandering Cypriot resources in the defense of Syria. King Henry I of Cyprus deserves a reassessment. The day of his greatest humiliation was also the day on which King Henry came of age. He had been forced to flee in his night-shirt on the back of a borrowed horse, while his entire army was decimated by the Emperor’s troops. Yet on his arrival in Acre as dawn broke, he was, at last, his own man. At fifteen, he was recognized as an adult, no longer tied to guardians, regents, and baillies. This meant that the Lord of Beirut was no longer his guardian and Ba

Henry I inherited his kingdom before he was a year old and was crowned at the age of eight, but as a child he remained at the mercy of his guardians and regents. In the first eleven years of his life, these had protected Henry from two attempts to disinherit him. They furthermore ensured his own safety and the welfare of his kingdom and subjects in an exemplary manor. All that changed with the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor. Emperor Frederick II viewed Cyprus as a vassal state, and he came to extract his “due.” His actions set in motion a chain of events that nearly cost Henry his kingdom and his life. Roughly six months after the death of Henry’s baillie Philip d’Ibelin — the closest thing to a father that Henry had ever known — the Holy Roman Emperor arrived in Cyprus with a large number of ships, nobles, knights, archbishops, scholars and harem slaves. Frederick II Hohenstaufen, after delaying his crusade for eleven years, was on his way to Acre to fulfill his crusading vows — al

He was called a “colorless personality” by historian George Hill [1] , while the leading scholar on medieval Cyprus, Peter Edbury, says he “ruled Cyprus without ever… holding the limelight in the politics of the Latin East of his day.” [2] Yet he was king for 35 years, and it was during his reign that Cyprus came to replace the Kingdom of Jerusalem as the “focus of Western culture in the Near East.” [3] Furthermore, he threw off the yoke of the Holy Roman Emperor, establishing Cyprus as an independent kingdom. He undertook significant legal reforms, was a staunch supporter of his Greek subjects against encroachments by the Latin clergy, and maintained excellent relations with his own barons. In short, Henry I may deserve a reassessment. Henry was born May 3, 1217, the third child but the first son of King Hugh I of Cyprus and his queen Alice de Champagne. (Alice was the daughter of Isabella I of Jerusalem and her third husband Henri de Champagne.) When Henry was just eight months o

The Sultan Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, more commonly known in the West as Saladin, had gone down in history as an exceptionally generous lord. Indeed, not only his contemporary biographers eulogized (and sometimes criticized) him for his generosity, the descendants of his opponents transformed him into a “perfect, gentle knight” to fit their own concepts of chivalry. By the 19 th Century, Saladin had been turned into a parody, a character better suited to an opera than the cut-throat politics of the 12 th century Middle East. Yet despite serious scholarship that puts Saladin more in perspective, some of his actions still stand out as exceptionally generous — particularly against the backdrop of Saladin’s ruthless rise to power. One of those acts of generosity was his treatment of Balian d’Ibelin and his lady during the siege of Jerusalem in 1187. Today I want to look more closely at that incident. At the Battle of Hattin on July 3/4, 1187, Saladin succeeded in delivering a devastat