Agnes of Courtenay ( – ) was a Frankish noblewoman who held considerable influence in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the reign of her son, King Baldwin IV. Though she was never queen, she has been described as the most powerful woman in the kingdom's history after Queen Melisende.
Agnes was of high birth but an impoverished young widow when she married Amalric of Jerusalem. They had two children, Sibylla and Baldwin. When Amalric unexpectedly inherited the crown in 1163, the High Court of Jerusalem refused to accept Agnes as queen and insisted that Amalric repudiate her. Agnes contracted two further advantageous marriages, to powerful noblemen Hugh of Ibelin and Reginald of Sidon successively.
Agnes's influence grew rapidly after Amalric died in 1174 and their teenage son, Baldwin IV, became king. Despite having been separated from him since his infancy, she became Baldwin's trusted advisor. Because he suffered from leprosy, he could not marry and was growing weaker. Agnes selected government officials and influenced succession by choosing husbands for both Sibylla and Isabella, Amalric's daughter by his second wife, Maria Comnena. She advised Baldwin to have Sibylla marry Guy of Lusignan, who thus became the king-in-waiting, and when Baldwin decided to disinherit Guy, Agnes convinced him and the nobility to crown Sibylla's son, Baldwin V, instead. The leper king died in early 1185; she died around the same time, possibly somewhat earlier.
Count Raymond III of Tripoli and the brothers Balian (second husband of Maria Comnena) and Baldwin of Ibelin were Agnes's chief contenders for power, and it is from sources close to them that nearly all information about Agnes is derived. She has consequently usually been criticized by historians as self-seeking, unscrupulous, and morally loose.
Early life
Agnes was born between 1134 and 1137. She hailed from the junior branch of the House of Courtenay. Her father, Count Joscelin II of Edessa, was the second cousin of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, Princess Alice of Antioch, and Countess Hodierna of Tripoli, connecting her to all the Frankish Catholic rulers of the Latin East. Beatrice, her mother, held estates at Saone (in the Principality of Antioch) in dower as the widow of William of Zardana.
Agnes's first marriage, to Reginald of Marash, ended in his death at the Battle of Inab in 1149. They had had no children. Agnes enjoyed dower rights in Marash until the town was conquered by the Muslim Turks a few months later. They captured her father the following year and kept him in prison. Her mother found herself unable to defend the remnants of the County of Edessa and sold them to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Komnenos, for an annual pension to be paid to herself and her children, Agnes and Joscelin III. The mother and children then retired to Saone, where Agnes stayed until 1157.
Royal marriage In 1157, Agnes came to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where she married Queen Melisende's younger son, Count Amalric, and became countess of Jaffa and Ascalon. Though she was penniless, historian Bernard Hamilton considers Agnes to have been the most suitable bride for Amalric in the crusader states due to her high birth. Yet the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, Fulcher of Angoulême, objected and Hamilton suspects that the marriage was only conducted after his death in 1157. According to William of Tyre, Fulcher was upset by the couple's kinship, while the 13th-century Lignages d'Outremer states that Agnes had been betrothed to the lord of Ramla, Hugh of Ibelin, and that Amalric married her when she came to marry Hugh, irritating the patriarch. Historian Hans E. Mayer concluded that Agnes had already been married to Hugh in 1157, making her marriage to Amalric bigamous. His colleague Malcolm Barber has suggested that Amalric may have abducted Agnes. Hamilton disagrees, arguing that bigamy would have resulted in the excommunication of the couple. Agnes gave birth to a daughter, Sibylla, between 1157 and 1161. In 1161 she had a son, Baldwin.
Upon the death of his brother, King Baldwin III, on 10 February 1163, Amalric stood to succeed to the throne of Jerusalem. Yet the High Court, composed of the bishops and barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, refused to recognize him as king unless he separated from Agnes. The reason for this request, which Hamilton considers unusual, is unclear because all the primary sources, including William of Tyre, are hostile to Agnes. Reasons proposed by scholars include a tarnished reputation of Agnes and fear of the barons that Agnes would bestow royal favor on the landless exiles from Edessa if she became queen. The High Court may also have that believed Agnes, like her mother-in-law, would wield power in the government or that Amalric could make a politically and financially better match; if so, they were to be proven right on both counts.
Amalric gave in to the High Court' demand; his and Agnes's marriage was annulled on the grounds of consanguinity. The reason was so flimsy that William of Tyre, who had been abroad at the time, had to ask Agnes's aunt Stephanie, abbess of St Mary Major, to explain it to him. The ecclesiastical court granted Amalric's request that their children, Sibylla and Baldwin, be legitimized, and that Agnes be absolved of any moral condemnation. Agnes was consequently never queen. She received no settlement, but did retain the prestigious title of countess, unique in the kingdom, for the rest of her life.
Remarriages Immediately after the annulment of the royal marriage, Agnes married Hugh of Ibelin, to whom she may have been engaged before meeting Amalric. Hamilton concludes from Agnes's ability to nearly instantly contract such an advantageous marriage that the High Court did not refuse to recognize her as queen due to a moral scandal. This marriage was likely arranged by Amalric, who benefited from no longer having to pay for his former wife's upkeep.
Agnes had little contact with her children after her separation from Amalric. Her son, Baldwin, was aged two; Hamilton believes that he grew up not knowing her and that they probably only saw each other on public occasions. Amalric only remarried in 1167, taking Emperor Manuel's grandniece Maria Komnene as his queen. The countess and the queen were on poor terms. Amalric's only surviving child with Maria was a daughter, Isabella. This proved troubling when Baldwin, his and Agnes's son, started showing signs of leprosy, which was then an incurable and much stigmatised illness.
Hugh died around 1169. Agnes then married her fourth and final husband, Reginald Grenier, who in 1171 succeeded his father, Gerard Grenier, as the lord of Sidon. Hamilton believes that the long-standing belief that Agnes and Reginald's marriage was dissolved at Gerard's request, and then presumably revalidated after Gerard's death, stems from the misunderstanding of Gerard's testimonial role in the dissolution of Agnes's marriage to Amalric.
Son's accession
King Amalric died after a short illness on 11 June 1174. The High Court agreed that there was no better candidate for new king than Agnes and Amalric's son, Baldwin IV, despite suspicions of leprosy. Being a minor, Baldwin needed a regent to rule on his behalf. The custom that the mother of the minor heir should govern on his or her behalf could not be applied in Baldwin's case: his mother, Agnes, was not the previous king's widow, while the previous king's widow, Queen Maria, was not the new king's mother. The High Court's ruling on that occasion that the right to regency belonged to the "nearest relation, male or female, on the mother’s side if the claim to the throne comes through the mother, or the nearest male relation on the father’s side if the claim to the throne comes through him" was entrenched into the law of the kingdom. Eventually it was Amalric's closest male kinsman, Count Raymond III of Tripoli, who claimed the regency.
Agnes returned to the royal court when Raymond became regent. This was probably requested by her husband, Reginald of Sidon, and Baldwin and Balian of Ibelin, brothers of her previous husband, Hugh, in return for their support of Raymond's regency. Raymond willingly shared the royal task of church patronage with Agnes: he made William of Tyre the new archbishop of Tyre in 1174, while she secured the appointment of Heraclius of Jerusalem to the archbishopric of Caesarea. Ernoul, a protegé of Amalric's Queen Maria, accuses Agnes of love affairs with Heraclius and Aimery of Lusignan, who was also on a steady rise to the highest position in the kingdom.
Courtenay ascendancy As the queen dowager, Maria, retired to her dower city of Nablus, Agnes's arrival at the court made her the queen mother in practice even if she was just a countess in title. She had to build a bond with an adolescent son who hardly knew her and though a great mutual affection developed between them, Hamilton believes that the relationship was likely more akin to that of aunt and nephew than to that of mother and son. Hamilton surmises that the young king was glad to have her back in his life and in charge of his household. Agnes came to strongly influence her daughter, Sibylla, as well.
In 1175, Agnes raised the funds to pay the ransom for her brother, Joscelin, who had been imprisoned by the Turks in Aleppo since 1164. Hamilton argues that Agnes could not have afforded the sum of 50,000 dinars and that it must have come from the royal treasury with the approval of the regent, Raymond. The following year, after Baldwin reached the age of majority and Raymond's regency ended, Agnes influenced Baldwin to name Joscelin to the vacant government post of seneschal. Hamilton believes that Joscelin, as an uncle with no claim to the throne, was a prudent choice; he proved both markedly competent and wholly loyal to the king.
Royal matchmaking
When it became apparent that Baldwin IV was indeed affected by leprosy and therefore precluded from marrying and siring children, the question of the marriage of Agnes's daughter, Sibylla, became central to the royal government. Sibylla's first husband, William Longsword of Montferrat, died in 1177, leaving her with a son, Baldwin. In 1180, under unclear circumstances, Sibylla, by then the countess of Jaffa and Ascalon in her own right, married Guy of Lusignan, brother of Aimery. She was supposed to marry Duke Hugh III of Burgundy but, according to Ernoul, promised her hand to Baldwin of Ibelin on the condition that he paid his debt to the Muslim ruler of Egypt, Saladin. While Baldwin of Ibelin was in Constantinople procuring Emperor Manuel's help in raising these funds, Ernoul elaborates, Sibylla and Agnes were convinced by Aimery that Sibylla should marry his brother Guy instead. Hamilton rejects this account as romanticized Ibelin propaganda, and argues that neither Sibylla nor Agnes would have acted so foolishly.