Haute Cour

Also known as High Court, Curia Regis, Court of Barons

The supreme feudal council of the Kingdom of Jerusalem — the assembly of crown vassals that judged the king's peers and ratified major acts of state.

The Haute Cour was the assembly of the kingdom's tenants-in-chief — the men and women who held their fiefs directly from the crown. It was simultaneously a court of law for cases touching the king or his vassals, a council that the king was expected to consult on matters of war, succession, and the realm at large, and the body that elected or confirmed regents and (in disputed cases) kings.

Its powers were never written down as a constitution; they were customary, articulated piecemeal in lawsuits and political crises. The classical account survives in the 13th-century Assises de Jérusalem, especially the Livre of John of Ibelin — but those treatises were composed after Hattin, largely in Cyprus, and their picture of a strong baronage limiting royal authority partly reflects the later, post-territorial situation rather than 12th-century practice.

Famous moments include the court's refusal to recognise Sibylla and Guy without conditions in 1186, its deposition of Frederick II's bailli during the War of the Lombards, and its near-continuous role in arbitrating between the Ibelins and the imperial party throughout the 13th century.

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