Dispute between Hugh III and Charles of Anjou

Also known as Angevin–Lusignan crown dispute

The final dynastic struggle for the throne of Jerusalem — between the resident Lusignan king of Cyprus and the absentee Charles of Anjou — that paralysed the kingdom on the eve of the Mamluk conquest.

The last decades of the kingdom were marred by a struggle for the crown between Hugh III of Cyprus, of the House of Lusignan, and Charles of Anjou, the king of Sicily. Charles purchased a parallel dynastic claim from Maria of Antioch — granddaughter of Isabella I, and the senior surviving heir in her own line — and in 1277 sent his vicar Roger of San Severino with an Angevin garrison to seize Acre in his name.

For several years the kingdom was effectively split. Acre and the great military orders recognised Charles, while the northern lordships and the loyal Lusignan barons recognised Hugh III. Charles's vicars governed from Acre as Latin emperors-in-waiting, with the Templars in particular acting as Angevin partisans. Hugh III withdrew to Cyprus in frustration and reigned from there as the rightful king of Jerusalem in title only.

The Sicilian Vespers of 1282 and Charles's death in 1285 broke the Angevin claim, and Hugh III's son Henry II of Lusignan was crowned in Tyre in 1286 as the last Frankish king of Jerusalem to reign on the mainland. By then the Angevin–Lusignan paralysis had cost the kingdom almost a decade of unified planning, and the Mamluks under Qalawun and al-Ashraf Khalil were within five years of taking Acre.

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