important roles in their old homeland of Champagne and in France as a
whole, as well as in the Low Countries, the British Isles, the Iberian
peninsula, the Latin empire of Constantinople, Cyprus and the Holy
Land. Furthermore, it is worth noting that it was there, in the Latin
East, that the Briennes made their most concerted effort to try to win
back the royal stature that had been their own less thanfifty years earlier.
Although they did not manage to scale such dizzying heights, it is
probably fair to say that this was the epoch when the dynasty was most
active in a wide range of different locales.
It is natural enough that, in the course of their ascent, the Briennes
forged a formidable array of links to the great powers of their day. If there
is one match that stands out in this respect, then it is King John of
Jerusalem’s third marriage, to Berengaria of Castile. This made him very
close kin not just to the Iberians but also to the French crown, and
opened the way to the Briennes’most important relationship in the late
thirteenth and into the fourteenth century: that is, with the house of
Anjou. The Briennes were exceptionally well-placed to take advantage
of this connection. It led not only to the re-establishment of the main
line of the dynasty in southern Italy, but also to Walter V’s accession as
duke of Athens, and then to his son’s brief reign assigniorof Florence.
However, along with exceptional opportunities came extraordinary pres-
sures, disappointments and dangers–and this is a point exemplified, for
example, by the death of Count Hugh in the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
The same array of connections meant that the Briennes were also
exceptionally well-placed to take advantage of their relationship with
the royal house of France. This is something that can be demonstrated
in many different ways, from the foundation of the cadet branches of Eu,
Guînes and Beaumont to the number and range of the‘crown offices’
that various Briennes acquired in the century or so after 1250. It is a sign
of the times, though, that this was not regarded as incompatible with a
variety of important English links that were forged during the same
period. These developed, in due course, into the central role played by
Henry of Beaumont, and other members of his family, in the Scottish
Wars of Independence. Moreover, these‘English’Beaumonts were easily
the longest survivors of the house of Brienne in the direct male line–
down, in fact, into the early sixteenth century.
Yet we should not allow the ways in which the Briennes were excep-
tional to blind us to the features of their experience that were rather more
representative of their times. We could start with the simple fact that, like
so many other French dynasties, the family’s‘field of interest’was small
and localized atfirst–focused, of course, within Champagne itself until
188 Conclusion