LUSIGNAN, the name of a family which sprang from Poitou and long held the kingdom of Cyprus A Hugh de Lusignan appears in the ill-fated crusade of Iioo–I 1 oi ; another Hugh, the Brown, came as a pilgrim to the Holy Land in 1164, and was taken prisoner by Nureddin. In the last quarter of the I2th century the two brothers Amalric and Guy, sons of Hugh the Brown, played a part in the history of the Latin East. About 1180 Amalric was constable of the kingdom of Jerusalem. His brother Guy married in 118o Sibylla, the widowed heiress of the kingdom. Guy acted as regent in 1183, but he had little success, and was deprived of all right of succession. In '186, however, on the death of Baldwin V., he became King of Jerusalem in spite of the opposition of Raymund of Tripoli. Next year he suffered a crushing defeat at the battle of Hittin, and was taken prisoner by Saladin. Released on parole in 1188, he at once broke his parole, and began the siege of Acre Difficulties, however, had arisen with Conrad of Montferrat ; and after Sibylla's death, Con rad won fresh support and was generally recognized as king in 1192. Though Conrad was almost immediately assassinated, the crown did not return to Guy, but went to Henry of Champagne, who married the widowed Isabella. Guy bought from the Templars the island of Cyprus, and there he reigned for the last two years of his life (1192-1194). He is judged harshly by contemporary writers, as simplex and insufficiens, but Dodu (in his Histoire des institutions du royaume de Jerusalem) suggests that Guy was depreciated because the kingdom had been lost in his reign, in much the same way as Godfrey of Bouillon was exalted because Jerusalem had just been won at his accession.
Guy was succeeded in Cyprus by his brother Amalric, who acquired the title of king of Cyprus from the emperor Henry VI., and became king of Jerusalem in 1197 by his marriage to Isabella, after the death of Henry of Champagne. (See AMALRIC II.)
Amalric was the founder of a dynasty of kings of Cyprus, which lasted till 1475, while after 1269 his descendants regularly enjoyed the title of kings of Jerusalem For the history of the Lusignan kings see Cyprus. The most famous were Hugh III. (the Great) (1267-85) to whom, apparently St. Thomas dedicated his De Regimine Principum; Hugh IV. (1324-59), to whom Boccaccio dedicated one of his works, and who set on foot an alliance with the pope, Venice and the Hospitallers, which resulted in the cap ture of Smyrna ; and Peter I. (1359-69). Peter and his chancellor de Mezieres represent the last flicker of the crusading spirit. (See CRUSADES.) Before the extinction of the line in it had placed a branch on the throne of Armenia. Five short-lived kings of the house ruled in Armenia after 1342, "Latin exiles," as Stubbs says, "in the midst of several strange populations all alike hostile." The kingdom of Armenia fell before the sultan of Egypt, who took prisoner its last king Leo V. in 1375, though the kings of Cyprus afterwards continued to bear the title ; the kingdom of Cyprus itself continued to exist under the house of Lusignan for ioo years longer. The mother of the last king, James III. (who died when he was two years old) was a Venetian lady, Catarina Cornaro. She had been made a daughter of the republic at the time of her marriage to the king of Cyprus ; and on the death of her child the republic first acted as guardian for its daughter, and then, in 1489, obtained from her the cession of the island.
See J. M. J. L. de Mas-Latrie, Histoire de Vile de Chypre sous les princes de la maison de Lusignan (1852-53) ; W. Stubbs, Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History (3rd ed., Oxford, 'goo).