responsibilities seriously. He may well have been very concerned, for
instance, about the welfare and prospects of his young nephew, Philip of
Courtenay, who bore the title of Latin emperor.^57 What is beyond doubt,
though, is that Louis contrived to remain on good terms with Charles
and his successors, despite Louis’s own seeming ‘lateness’onto the
Italian scene. For example, the crown helped to protect one of Louis’s
dependents, and the viscount of Beaumont was also granted the privilege
of retaining some land in the South, even though he was not resident
there.^58
The most dramatic and far-flung consequence of Louis’s trip to south-
ern Italy was the fate of his young daughter, Margaret. Louis left her
there to be brought up as a part of the Angevin royal family. Dunbabin
has made the intriguing suggestion that the child may well have been
regarded as a bride for a member of the dynasty–although, in the end,
nothing came of this.^59 From 1277 onwards, as we shall see, Charles was
claiming the crown of Jerusalem too, and this meant that he had another
use for his kinswoman. A year later, he dispatched her to the Latin East to
wed Bohemund VII, count of Tripoli and prince of Antioch (although
the latter had actually fallen to the Egyptians a decade earlier).^60 This
marriage might serve a number of purposes, besides the obvious one of
tying the prince to Charles. Throwing the Brienne name back into the
East could also have been a way of trying to frighten Charles’s rival, King
Hugh of Cyprus and Jerusalem (that is, Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan).^61
Bohemund died in his mid-twenties, however, leaving no children.
A couple of years later, in 1289, Tripoli too was conquered by the
Egyptians, marking‘the beginning of the end’for the mainland Crusader
States.^62 By then, though, Princess Margaret had returned to the West–
and it is noteworthy that, once back there, she was still regarded as an
honorary member of the house of Anjou. She went to live in retirement
with King Charles’s widow, also called Margaret, until the latter’s death
in 1309. During much of this period, they had the company of another
close kinswoman: Catherine of Courtenay, the daughter and heiress of
Philip. Contemporary statues of the two Margarets survive, to this day,
in thehôtel-dieuof Tonnerre, founded by the former queen of Sicily
herself.^63
(^57) As suggested in Dunbabin,The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 142. (^58) Ibid., 64.
(^59) Ibid., 142. (^60) RCA, xviii, register 80, nos. 853–4, 859. (^61) See also below,128.
(^62) Perhaps the best account is still in René Grousset’s classic, Histoire des croisades et du
63 royaume franc de Jérusalem,3 vols. (Paris, 1934–6), iii, 734–45.
See Dunbabin,The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 74, 142; and F. Baron,L’art au temps
des rois maudits: Philippe le Bel et sesfils, 1285– 1328 (Paris, 1998), 119–20. For an
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