The crusader crown

The other crowns were hunted. This one was overlooked.

Fulk the Fifth, Count of Anjou, has stood in this tree since the Plantagenet door opened: father of Geoffrey of Anjou, grandfather of Henry II, an ancestor as solidly documented as any in the file. What the research had not paused on was what Fulk did with the second half of his life. In 1129, a widower nearing forty, he handed Anjou to his son and sailed east to marry Melisende, heiress of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and from 1131 until his death in a hunting accident in 1143 he reigned as King of Jerusalem, ruler of the crusader state at its height.

The honest print matters here, as always. This family's descent from Fulk runs through his first marriage, made in Anjou before he ever saw the East; it does not pass through Jerusalem or through Melisende's line. The crown was his own, worn in person, and by the counting rule this site has used from the start, a crown belongs on the roll if its crowned holder stands in the documented direct line. He does. So the Kingdom of Jerusalem, of all improbable realms, becomes the eighteenth sovereign crown in the family record, and the count that began months ago with a single cautious door at Domesday now stretches from the Shannon to the Holy Land.

His grandsons through the first marriage were kings of England. His sons through the second were kings of Jerusalem. The two halves of his family faced each other across Christendom, and a Cork family a thousand years later turns out to be sitting in the English half, counting its luck and grading its sources. The roll of all eighteen crowns and twenty-two houses is drawn in The Royal Houses.