The House of Lusignan
Continuing intermarriage between the aristocracy of Armenia and the Templars produced the influential house of Lusignan, a family that would come to dominate throughout the remainder of the Crusaders’ occupation of the Holy Land, and whose lineage would exercise a powerful influence in the development of the occult tradition of the Middle Ages. The family derive their name from the Château de Lusignan, the largest castle in France, because it was believed to have been built in a single night, through magical powers, by a female demon named Melusina. Also known as Melusine, she was Melusinde, the daughter of Baldwin II. A Templar, Baldwin II married Morfia of Armenia, and later became king of Jerusalem in 1143.
Baldwin II had no male heirs but had already designated his daughter Melisende to succeed him. He wanted to safeguard his daughter’s inheritance by marrying her to a powerful lord, and so chose Fulk V of Anjou, after he had been married to his first wife, through whom he fathered Georffrey Plantagenet. Fulk V was also the brother of Ermengarde of Anjou, who married Alain IV of Brittany. Fulk V joined the crusade in 1120, and became a close friend of the Knights Templars. After his return he began to subsidise the Templars, and maintained two knights in the Holy Land for a year.
The House of Lusignan were finally defeated by Saladin at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Having lost their claim, Richard the Lionheart sold them the island of Cyprus, which they controlled until 1489. They were titular rulers of Jerusalem, or more accurately, Acre, from 1268 until the fall of the city in 1291. In 1291, the Muslims had attacked Acre with an army of 200,000 men. Of the Templars, including their Grand Master, only ten escaped of five hundred knights. Henry II, the patriarch, and the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, with the few survivors, escaped back to Cyprus.
However, on their return to Cyprus, the Templars conspired against the Lusignan rulers. Then, in 1306, under pressure from Phillip IV king of France, the Pope summoned Jacques de Molay, then Grand Master of the Templars, from Cyprus to answer the charges of heresy. The Templars were charged with practicing witchcraft, of denying the tenets of the Christian faith, spitting or urinating on the cross during secret rites of initiation, worshipping a skull or head called Baphomet in a dark cave, anointing it with blood or the fat of unbaptised babies, worshipping the devil in the shape of a black cat, and committing acts of sodomy and bestiality. Many Templars were executed or imprisoned, and the order’s last grand master, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake.
In 1308, the Lusignan leaders received letters from the Pope directing them to arrest all the Templars in Cyprus. Their property was handed over to the Hospitallers. Therefore, the arrest of the Templars seems merely to have been a pretext to transfer their property to the Hospitallers. The nobility of Europe had been calling for a unification of the orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers, but Jacques de Molay was resisting the move. Following the fall of Acre, when Phillip IV of France was calling for a renewed Crusade, de Molay again refused participation.
In 1309, after over two years of campaigning, the Hospitallers captured the island of Rhodes, and were then known as the Knights of Rhodes. They were eventually forced from there by the Ottoman Turks, and then settled in Malta, after which they were renamed as the Knights of Malta.
