A king of Jerusalem in England: the visit of John of Brienne in 1223

In the autumn of 1223, John of Brienne paid a brief visit to England. This is unique, since it represents the one and only visit to England by a king of Jerusalem who was not entirely titular (that is, during the actual lifetime of the kingdom in the mainland Levant, from 1100-1291). This article will take John’s visit as the centrepiece for a broader discussion of the impact that the king had on England, and vice versa, surveying the period from the late 1210s to the early 1230s. The article concludes that whilst the visit was something of an anomaly, it cannot be written off as a mere curiosity. It takes its place as one of myriad ways in which England was stitched into the very fabric of Latin Christendom in the first half of the thirteenth century, during the ‘golden age’ of crusading.