duchess of Athens.^195 However, the vast majority of the Brienne inherit-
ance went immediately to Isabella, as Walter had wished, and thence
to the Enghien family, who duly divided it up among themselves.^196
Of course, they continued to pursue much the same interests and con-
cerns that had preoccupied their Brienne forebears. In a sense, then, the
extinction of the original house of Brienne provides only punctuation,
and not the end of the story. Indeed, Isabella’s granddaughter, Mary of
Enghien, countess of Lecce, actually found her way back onto the throne
of her distant ancestor, King Tancred, when she married Ladislaus of
Naples in 1407.^197 After the Enghiens, the county of Brienne passed into
the hands of the house of Luxembourg, who held it, with only a brief
interruption, until the takeover of the Loménie family in the seventeenth
century. It is highly appropriate that the death of the last count of Brienne
fits, so very neatly, with the principal theme of this chapter: that is, the
way in which the family’s story dissolves into the mainstream of French
history. Louis-Marie-Athanase de Loménie–sometime minister of war,
and brother of the far more famous Étienne-Charles–perished on the
scaffold on 10 May 1794.^198
(^195) Seeibid., clauses 4, 137; and Roserot,Dictionnaire, i, 246.
(^196) Indeed, Walter’s nephew and successor as count of Brienne, Sohier of Enghien, had
already served as his lieutenant in Greece. See Luttrell,‘The Latins of Argos and
197 Nauplia’, 38.
De Sassenay,Brienne, 244.^198 Roserot,Dictionnaire, i, 247–8.
The Thickets of Poitiers 183