Conradin

Also known as the last Hohenstaufen

Conradin — Conrad the Younger, last of the Hohenstaufen — was two years old when his father's death made him King of Jerusalem. He lived his short life in Italy and Bavaria and, like his father before him, never came east. The kingdom in his name was governed entirely through the baronial High Court and a series of regents drawn from the Lusignan kings of Cyprus.

This absence produced the one thing Outremer did best in the thirteenth century: law. Deprived of a resident king, jurists like Philip of Novara, John of Ibelin of Jaffa and James of Ibelin spent decades codifying the customs of the High Court into the most detailed feudal constitution of the Middle Ages — the Assises de Jérusalem — which would still be quoted by Venetian lawyers in the sixteenth century. The kingdom's territory continued to shrink under the Mamluk sultans Baybars and Qalawun, but its legal culture flourished.

Conradin's end was operatic. In 1268, sixteen years old, he led a German expedition into southern Italy to recover his Hohenstaufen patrimony from Charles of Anjou. Charles defeated him at Tagliacozzo, captured him days later, and beheaded him in the main square of Naples on 29 October 1268. With his execution the Hohenstaufen line ended, and the Jerusalem throne passed, by the ruling of the High Court, to his cousin Hugh III of Cyprus.

Preceded by Conrad II. Succeeded by Hugh I.

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