Hugh I

Also known as Hugh III of Cyprus, “the Great”

Already King of Cyprus since 1267 and grandson of Hugh I of Cyprus through the female line, Hugh of the Poitiers-Lusignan house was chosen by the High Court of Acre on Conradin's execution in 1268, against the rival claim of his cousin Hugh of Brienne. He was the first resident King of Jerusalem in forty years — a genuine attempt to reassemble a functioning monarchy in the kingdom's final hour. In Jerusalem he reigned as Hugh I.

He spent the next sixteen years trying to rule two kingdoms and two sets of vassals separated by a hundred miles of sea. His Cypriot knights routinely refused to serve on the mainland, on the grounds that their feudal obligation was to defend the island. His mainland authority was undermined from 1277, when Maria of Antioch sold her parallel dynastic claim to Charles of Anjou, the Angevin king of Sicily; Angevin troops seized Acre and compelled Hugh to retreat to Tyre and then Cyprus. His brief cooperation with Prince Edward of England during the Lord Edward's Crusade of 1271 managed a ten-year truce with Sultan Baybars but no permanent recovery.

Contemporaries called him handsome and charming and noted, with some understatement, that he had a temper. He was a patron of French romance literature, founded Cistercian houses in Cyprus, and was the dedicatee of Philip of Novara's political memoirs. Historians judge him an able ruler who arrived too late — the Templar–Hospitaller and Venetian–Genoese feuds inside the surviving kingdom made unity impossible, and the Mamluk Sultanate was by now overwhelmingly stronger than the coastal enclave he was trying to save.

Preceded by Conradin. Succeeded by John II.

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