A study of the career of John of Ibelin, followed by his record of the institutions, government and resources of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the 13c.

This critical edition of the legal treatise by John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon (died 1266) is the first to take into account all the surviving medieval manuscripts and the first to be published since 1841.

Evolving from a patrician domus, the emperor's residence on the Palatine became the centre of the state administration. Elaborate ceremonial regulated access to the imperial family, creating a system of privilege which strengthened the centralised power. Constantine followed the same model in his new capital, under a Christian veneer. The divine attributes of the imperial office were refashioned, with the emperor as God's representative. The palace was an imitation of heaven. Following the loss of the empire in the West and the Near East, the Palace in Constantinople was preserved – subject to the transition from Late Antique to Mediaeval conditions – until the Fourth Crusade, attracting the attention of Visgothic, Lombard, Merovingian, Carolingian, Norman and Muslim rulers. Renaissance princes later drew inspiration for their residences directly from ancient ruins and Roman literature, but there was also contact with the Late Byzantine court. Finally, in the age of Absolutism the palace became again an instrument of power in vast centralised states, with renewed interest in Roman and Byzantine ceremonial. Spanning the broadest chronological and geographical limits of the Roman imperial tradition, from the Principate to the Ottoman empire, the papers in the volume treat various aspects of palace architecture, art and ceremonial.

Emperor Frederick II, called "enlightened" by historians yet decried as a despot by contemporaries, unleashes a civil war that tears the Holy Land apart. The heir to an intimidating legacy, a woman artist, and a boy king are caught up in the game of emperors and popes. Set against the backdrop of the Sixth Crusade, Rebels against Tyranny takes you from the harems of Sicily to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, from the palaces of privilege to the dungeons of despair. This is a timeless tale of youthful audacity taking on tyranny―but sometimes courage is not enough....

John d'Ibelin, son of the legendary Balian, will one day defy the most powerful monarch on earth. But first he must survive his apprenticeship as squire to a man determined to build a kingdom on an island ravaged by rebellion. The Greek insurgents have already driven the Knights Templar from the island, and now stand poised to destroy Richard the Lionheart's legacy to the Holy Land: a crusader foothold on the island of Cyprus.

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily, King of Jerusalem, has, since his death in 1250, enjoyed a reputation as one of the most remarkable monarchs in the history of Europe. His wide cultural tastes, his apparent tolerance of Jews and Muslims, his defiance of the papacy, and his supposed aim of creating a new, secular world order make him a figure especially attractive to contemporary historians. But as David Abulafia shows in this powerfully written biography, Frederick was much less tolerant and far-sighted in his cultural, religious, and political ambitions than is generally thought. Here, Frederick is revealed as the thorough traditionalist he really was: a man who espoused the same principles of government as his twelfth-century predecessors, an ardent leader of the Crusades, and a king as willing to make a deal with Rome as any other ruler in medieval Europe. Frederick's realm was vast. Besides ruling the region of Europe that encompasses modern Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, eastern France, and northern Italy, he also inherited the Kingdom of Sicily and parts of the Mediterranean that include what are now Israel, Lebanon, Malta, and Cyprus. In addition, his Teutonic knights conquered the present-day Baltic States, and he even won influence along the coasts of Tunisia. Abulafia is the first to place Frederick in the wider historical context his enormous empire demands. Frederick's reign, Abulafia clearly shows, marked the climax of the power struggle between the medieval popes and the Holy Roman Emperors, and the book stresses Frederick's steadfast dedication to the task of preserving both dynasty and empire. Through the course of this rich, groundbreaking narrative, Frederick emerges as less of the innovator than he is usually portrayed. Rather than instituting a centralized autocracy, he was content to guarantee the continued existence of the customary style of government in each area he ruled: in Sicily he appeared a mighty despot, but in Germany he placed his trust in regional princes, and never dreamed of usurping their power. Abulafia shows that this pragmatism helped bring about the eventual transformation of medieval Europe into modern nation-states. The book also sheds new light on the aims of Frederick in Italy and the Near East, and concentrates as well on the last fifteen years of the Emperor's life, a period until now little understood. In addition, Abulfia has mined the papal registers in the Secret Archive of the Vatican to provide a new interpretation of Frederick's relations with the papacy. And his attention to Frederick's register of documents from 1239-40--a collection hitherto neglected--has yielded new insights into the cultural life of the German court. In the end, a fresh and fascinating picture develops of the most enigmatic of German rulers, a man whose accomplishments have been grossly distorted over the centuries.

In the present volume, the third selection of his articles to be published, Professor Mayer deals with questions of royal authority and power in the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. He first examines the relationship between the monarchy and the Church, questions of royal succession, and aspects of the royal chancery, but is also concerned to trace the king’s efforts to create a new clientele of loyal vassals. The second group of studies reverses the perspective, and looks at the origins and development of the lordships of the kingdom, notably at the important county of Jaffa and at the role of the Ibelin, the most significant family in the land.

This is a study of the feudal nobles in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem; their status in Palestinian society, their lordships and their political ideas; and the development of these ideas as expressed in constitutional conflicts with kings and regents from 1174 to 1277.

The only one-volume scholarly survey of the ethnic groups, economy, religion, literature, and art of the multicultural Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus during the first centuries of Frankish rule following the conquest of the Byzantine island in the Third Crusade.