• DOI:10.2307/2849244
• Corpus ID: 161153870

The Lords of Lusignan in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

@article{Painter1957TheLO,
  title={The Lords of Lusignan in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries},
  author={Sidney Painter},
  journal={Speculum},
  year={1957},
  volume={32},
  pages={27 - 47}
}

• S. Painter
• Published 1 January 1957
• History
• Speculum

FEW feudal families are of interest to as wide a variety of scholarly specialists as the house of Lusignan. The historian of Poitou sees the Lusignans as the most turbulent and vigorous of the region's baronial dynasties -one which in the thirteenth century almost succeeded in creating a feudal principality between the Loire and the Garonne. To the historian of France as a whole the Lusignans were for many years the chief impediment to the development of Capetian authority in Northern Aquitaine. The student of English history is interested in them both as participants in the long struggle between the Capetians and the Plantagenets and as intimates of King Henry III. The fact that, once the Crusades began, every head of the house of Lusignan was a Crusader, and that the family supplied three kings of Jerusalem and the dynasty which ruled Cyprus until 1474, has centered on it the attention of specialists in the history of the Crusades and the Latin East. The literary historian is attracted by the family so deeply involved with the famous legend of Melusine. Finally, the student of feudal institutions finds in the Lusignans a family which has a reasonably well established history from the ninth to the fourteenth century. It is this last aspect that is the primary interest of this article. The activities of the Lusignans in France, England, and the Near East after the year 1200 are well known, but only an unpublished dissertation deals with the early history of the family. Yet it supplies a fascinating example of the process by which a tenth-century landed family could develop into a thirteenth-century baronial house. According to the Chronicle of Saint-Maixent, the founder of the house of Lusignan was Hugh Venator. His son and successor, Hugh Carus, built the castle of Lusignan.1 As the Lusignans were the most powerful neighbors and chief vassals of the abbey of St-Maixent, there seems to be no reason for rejecting the chronicler's tatement. M. Richard assumes that Hugh I was the huntsman, perhaps the chief huntsman, of the count of Poitou, but the fact that in later years the Lusignans held the forest o the east of their castle from the bishop of Poitiers suggests that Hugh may have held his office from that prelate.2 The first definite reference to the castle of Lusignan is in 1009.3 Beginning about 960 the name Hugh appears frequently among the witnesses to the count's charters, but