Angevin establishment.^54 Indeed, there is a clear contrast between Louis
and his elder brother, Alfonso, which can serve to sum up much of this
story. Unlike Alfonso, who was laid to rest with his great royal kinsmen,
Louis was interred among his wife’s predecessors in the Beaumont family
monastery of Étival (mod. Étival-en-Charnie).^55
Despite all this‘integration’, though, the Brienne family’s past and
identity had not been forgotten. This may come across, most plainly, in a
common feature that unites Louis and Alfonso: both of them named
their heir‘John’. However, the career of Louis’s son, John of Beaumont,
is exceptionally obscure. It seems that he was already quite old, by
medieval standards, when his father died in 1297. At this juncture, John
could well have expected to inherit the viscounty of Beaumont (which,
of course, Louis had actually held in right of his wife, Agnes). This does
not seem to have happened, however, and we are forced into a world of
fruitless speculation when we try to explain why not. Indeed, it appears
that John never became viscount at all. However, he should not be
written off as yet another‘John Lackland’. He may well have been able
to fall back, for example, on various lordships that had come to him by
marriage–such as those of hisfirst wife, Jeanne of Guerche, lady of
Pouancé and Château-Gontier. Thus, in the end, it would seem that
Louis’s heir was ultimately his grandson, Robert, who succeeded to the
viscounty not long after the start of the new century.^56
However, the Brienne family’s links and connections were far more
alive in the Mediterranean than in the Angevin north. Louis could not
have remained unaffected by the fact that his lord, Charles, became king
of Sicily in 1265– 6 – and, indeed, that this realm was Charles’s main
focus and preoccupation for the rest of his life. It is noteworthy that
the viscount of Beaumont does not seem to have been involved in the
conquest itself. In so far as we can tell, he went south only after the
process was complete. He visited the kingdom of Sicily in the aftermath
of the second crusade of his kinsman, Louis IX. As we have seen, this
expedition had witnessed not only the death of the king himself but also
of Louis of Beaumont’s elder brother, Alfonso of Eu. This would have
left Louis as the effective head of his branch of the Brienne family–that
is, of the various lines descended from John, king of Jerusalem and Latin
emperor of Constantinople. It would not be surprising if Louis took these
(^54) See Dunbabin’s observations inCharles I of Anjou, 30, and inThe French in the Kingdom
of Sicily, 61.
(^55) For a recent survey of the history of the abbey, seeL’abbaye d’Étival-en-Charnie
56 (1109–2009): un site, une histoire, ed. P. Grégoire (Chemiré-en-Charnie, 2011).
See the family tree inEuropäische Stammtafeln:Neue Folge, compiled by D. Schwennike
et al. (Marburg, 1978–), iii, part 4, table 684.
114 The Angevins and Athens (c. 1267–1311)