The Lusignan family was a major player in medieval politics, with branches in western France, Great Britain, and the Latin East. Clément de Vasselot de Régné here provides a massive study of the family from its early tenth-century origins to the fourteenth century, when most of the male-line branches of the family died out. But they were remembered, perhaps most notably in the late medieval romance Mélusine, with which Vasselot begins his Introduction. His purpose is to use this extended lineage to demonstrate the rise of castellan power, the broad dispersion of family members, and the ways that various brothers and cousins worked together.
The lords of Lusignan are well known to historians, even though no one before has attempted to study all of the family’s branches over the course of half a millennium. Yet Vasselot notes that family members are usually cast as what he calls “anti-heroes” in modern historical accounts (21), because they were often opposed to those now considered great nationalizing figures, including both the Capetians and the Plantagenets. Gui of Lusignan was the king of Jerusalem who lost the Latin kingdom in battle in 1187, and Hugh IX “the Brown” of Lusignan’s complaint that King John of England had taken his intended bride led ultimately to the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, England’s loss of its Angevin Empire, and Magna Carta. Here in contrast the Lusignan family is not merely rehabilitated but celebrated for their many accomplishments.
The book is arranged topically. After the Introduction, the first chapter gives an overview of the family’s history for the four hundred years covered by the book. The following five chapters address in order the narrative of how the lords gained authority over men and territory; their conflicts with other powerful entities; family cohesion; the perpetuation of the lineage; and the family’s religious practices. He refers throughout to this family group as a parentat, by which he means to suggest the political power of a collection of relatives, tied together both horizontally and vertically by bonds of blood.
An enormous amount of research clearly went into this book. It is based primarily on some five thousand charters, both printed and in manuscript, that mention Lusignan family members, put into an extensive bibliographic context. The author appears to find even 800 large pages with small print barely enough for everything he has to say. Particularly noteworthy are the family trees, indicating Lusignan connections that spread across Europe and across the centuries. In order to fit everyone who needed to be together onto one page, the names are often printed so small as to require a magnifying glass. Unlike too many historians, Vasselot worked out the family connections himself rather than simply relying on the work of others.
Vasselot treats the lands under the lords of Lusignan as a “feudal state” (24), which he defines as a territory in which the king is able to intervene only through the intermediary of the prince. Feudalism for him denotes both a kingdom without a strong central authority and also ties of fidelity which, he assumes (157), always involved fiefs and vassalage even though the documents rarely say so before the thirteenth century. His central theme is that an extended family’s actions have to be considered a major factor in the creation of such a feudal state, rather than solely the actions of the lords themselves. He argues that scholars have taken the state or the principality as the basic unit for analysis, rather than the family, and that this approach needs to be reversed. In analyzing how both the lords of Lusignan and their state gained their powerful position, he delves into a variety of political, social, and economic factors. These include the location of Lusignan itself on the route of the rich salt trade, a series of marriages with heiresses, alliances with other lords (some involving fiefs), and negotiations with kings that worked to their own advantage.
Vasselot is certainly correct if not ground-breaking in noting that the medieval aristocracy was a web of international connections during the period studied. Besides the examples he gives, one can note that Count Charles the Good of Flanders, famously murdered in the 1120s, was born to the king of Denmark and was briefly succeeded in Flanders by the nephew of the king of England, while his county was considered under the suzerainty of the French king. The widespread connections of the lords of Lusignan were scarcely a novel phenomenon. In framing his study as political history, and his unproblematic adoption of feudalism as an analytic term, Vasselot gives the book a rather old-fashioned feel. In some ways it reads more like the life-long project of a history buff, in spite of its impressive amount of research, rather than a piece of twenty-first-century scholarship.
Here both a strength and a weakness of the work is its extremely narrow focus on the lords of Lusignan. A basic shortcoming is to treat the reified family unit as the sum of all the connections the author has been able to establish, rather than asking how family members themselves would have considered the Lusignan lineage. Vasselot’s discussion of family consciousness does not go much further than a historiographic discussion, spanning over sixty-five years of scholarship, of the question of whether an amorphous kindred (Sippe) transformed into a patrilineage around the year 1000.
He notes that the theory of a simple shift from cognatic to agnatic families has not gained universal acceptance (indeed many, including me, have argued against it), and he argues that too much attention to the central lineage can obscure cousins and sub-lineages (345). Yet he essentially treats the Lusignan relatives as defined by the male line, those descended, through men, from the early tenth-century Lord Hugh I “the Hunter.” He does follow the descendants of younger brothers, rather than focusing solely on those who held the title of Lusignan, but he is quite uninterested in their sisters. In spite of saying that women are also a part of his study, he explicitly excludes any discussion of wives beyond their relations with their Lusignan husband and children. This is somewhat ironic, given that he also argues that a major reason the lords were able to expand their holdings and their power was a series of advantageous marriages.
It seems a bit of a stretch to assume that all the familial connections that can now be discovered were known to the lords of Lusignan and influenced their actions. Just as a modern amateur genealogist may go on Ancestry or similar sites and be surprised to discover second cousins she never knew existed (grandchildren of her own grandparents’ siblings), medieval people could never have been conscious of all the collateral branches of their family trees. Even if they were, focusing only on paternal, not maternal, relatives, as Vasselot does, would seem to leave out an important part of the story. Especially since cousins and second and third cousins were spread out across hundreds of miles, they cannot have kept very close track of the doings of anyone beyond immediate family. But Vasselot assumes that the extended family (parentat) always knew who their distant relatives were.
Overall, one takes away from this book a renewed appreciation of how international was the medieval aristocracy, and how wide was their web of connections. Because the focus throughout is the male-defined family group rather than alliances between non-relatives, equal attention to in-laws would have required even more family trees, and his many maps would have been packed even more densely with important locations than they are now. The treaties, betrayals, plots, sudden deaths, and contested marriages detailed in these pages make the conflicts in modern fictional works (like A Game of Thrones) seem tepid in comparison. No one else is likely in the foreseeable future to undertake such a wide-ranging study of the lords of Lusignan, and the book will be an invaluable resource to anyone whose own research requires an understanding of some portion of the Lusignan collection of relatives. But one still emerges from its pages having learned little new about medieval aristocratic families and power.