Aimery of Lusignan

Also known as king of two crowns

Older brother of Guy of Lusignan, Aimery had come east with him in the 1170s and built a separate reputation as a capable constable of Jerusalem. After Hattin he followed Guy to Cyprus, inherited the island on his brother's death in 1194, and in 1197 — on the sudden death of Henry of Champagne — was brought back to the mainland to marry Isabella and add the Kingdom of Jerusalem to his Cypriot crown. He wore both for the next eight years.

A methodical administrator where Guy had been chaotic, he secured a series of truces with Saladin's nephew al-Adil that preserved the coastal strip from Jaffa to Beirut, and commissioned the Livre au Roi around the year 1200 — a royalist legal treatise that tried, as far as was still possible, to define the monarch's rights over an increasingly independent nobility. He was the first ruler in a decade to give the Second Kingdom a quiet year.

He died in Acre on 1 April 1205, by one continuator of William of Tyre's chronicle “of a surfeit of white mullet” — a bout of acute food poisoning that turned to dysentery. The two crowns separated at once: Cyprus passed to his son Hugh I, Jerusalem to his stepdaughter Maria of Montferrat, who was thirteen.

Preceded by Henry II of Champagne. Succeeded by Maria of Montferrat.

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