The Angevin dynasty of Jerusalem, descended from Fulk of Anjou and Queen Melisende, that ruled the crusader kingdom at its height and through its crisis.
The dynasty began in 1129 when Fulk V, Count of Anjou — the grandfather of the Plantagenet Henry II, but here founding a wholly separate royal line — came to the Holy Land and married Melisende, heiress of Baldwin II. On Baldwin’s death in 1131 they became king and queen of Jerusalem.
This House of Anjou-Rethel should not be confused with the Angevin Plantagenets or the later Capetian House of Anjou: it was its own dynasty, ruling in the crusader East.
Melisende was a powerful queen who ruled jointly with her husband and then contested power with her son Baldwin III. Under Baldwin III and his brother Amalric I the kingdom reached its greatest strength, even invading Fatimid Egypt in the 1160s in an attempt to control the Nile.
But the same years saw the rise of a united Muslim Syria under Nur ad-Din and then Saladin, and the loss of the northern county of Edessa that had triggered the Second Crusade.
Amalric’s son Baldwin IV came to the throne as a boy already afflicted with leprosy. Despite his illness he proved a capable soldier, checking Saladin at Montgisard in 1177, but his early death and the disputed succession among the factions of his sister Sibylla and half-sister Isabella fatally divided the kingdom.
Sibylla’s husband Guy of Lusignan, made king, led the army to catastrophe at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, after which Saladin took Jerusalem itself.
The kingdom survived only as a coastal rump based at Acre, recovered in part by the Third Crusade. The crown passed through Isabella I and her successive husbands — of the houses of Montferrat, Champagne, and Lusignan — so that royal authority increasingly lay with the queen’s consorts rather than a single dynasty.
With Isabella the direct Angevin line of Jerusalem effectively ended, and the much-reduced kingdom passed to other families.
The House of Anjou-Rethel ruled Outremer at its zenith and presided over its greatest catastrophe. Its kings — especially Baldwin IV, the Leper King who never surrendered — became enduring figures of crusader history.
The loss of Jerusalem in 1187 reshaped Europe’s relationship with the crusades, provoking the Third Crusade and centuries of efforts to recover the holy city.