There is a certain irony in the fact that, by the time that Walter actually
arrived in the Latin East, the war against the Hohenstaufen had been won
on Cyprus, to all intents and purposes, and a stalemate had developed in
the kingdom of Jerusalem that would persist until the early 1240s.^77 In
retrospect, then, it is fair to say that the deal with Walter was largely
redundant. Nevertheless, the marriage went ahead, and the couple were
allocated a‘generous landed settlement’on the island.^78 From this point
onwards, the senior line of the house of Brienne held a variety of estates
on Cyprus, all the way down until the dynasty’s extinction in the mid-
fourteenth century.^79 Moreover, Walter was soon involved on the main-
land too. In the mid-1230s, Walter participated in a campaign led by the
Hospitallers, which included 100 Cypriot knights under John of Ibelin,
and lesser contingents from the kingdom of Jerusalem and the county
of Tripoli.^80 We may guess that thisfirst foray into the Holy Land is
connected to the fact that, soon after his arrival in the East, Walter
acquired the lordship of Jaffa–and it seems that this was on behalf of
his new mother-in-law, Queen Alice (that is, the elder sister of Philippa,
who had married Erard I of Ramerupt).^81 Although little is known about
Walter’s rule in Jaffa, it is clear that his reassertion of seigneurial author-
ity there brought him into conflict with the Church. Joinville admits that,
by the mid-1240s, Walter had been excommunicated by the patriarch of
Jerusalem, apparently because‘[Count Walter] had refused to return a
tower at Jaffa, called the Tower of the Patriarch, to him’. One might
guess that the clue was in the name.^82 Joinville goes on to present us with
a highly charged narrative, which comes to a peak just before the fatal
charge at La Forbie in 1244. According to the chronicler, Walter pleaded
twice for absolution before battle against the enemies of Christ, but the
patriarch remained unmoved. Thereupon, says Joinville, the bishop of
Ramla broke all the rules of ecclesiastical discipline and absolved Walter
anyway.^83 The point of the story, one suspects, is to gloss over the fact
that Walter was defeated, captured and eventually perished in a state of
anathema, and this would notfit with the image of‘heroic martyr’that
Joinville works so hard to promote.
(^77) See Edbury,John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem,47–50; and hisThe Kingdom of
Cyprus and the Crusades,64–5.
(^78) Ibid., 79.
(^79) Atfirst sight, it has to be said, this is rather surprising. For more details, see below,
99 – 102, 182.
(^80) Although the date of this campaign is not quite clear, the most detailed account of it can
be found in‘Colbert-Fontainebleau’, 403–5. Edbury gives the year as 1235 in hisJohn of
81 Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 50.
82 For the debate surrounding the nature of Walter’s tenure of Jaffa, seeibid.,80–1.
Joinville,‘Life’, section 530.^83 Ibid., sections 530–2.
Cyprus and the Holy Land 91