The Montfort Family and the Transregional Character of Aristocratic Francophone Northern European–Mediterranean Networks in the 13th and 14th Centuries

The Montforts were a northern French family whose field of action extended to England, the Languedoc, Tunis, Syria, and Cyprus. Individuals from multiple generations and in multiple branches of the family moved back and forth and maintained regular contacts between the Latin West and Latin East and otherwise around the Mediterranean. Their activities included crusading, diplomacy, marriage, and settlement. The Montforts were also major political operators in both local affairs and transregional struggles. Key figures included Philip of Montfort (d.1270), lord of Tyre, and his first cousin, Simon of Montfort, 6th earl of Leicester (d.1265), both of whose fathers participated in the Fourth Crusade and the Albigensian Crusade. Philip was born in France and married there, but after his first wife died, he went on crusade to Syria, where he remained and married an Armenian princess and acquired the lordships of Toron and Tyre. Simon also crusaded to the eastern Mediterranean, but returned to England, where he and his brother and sons became involved with the famed baronial revolt against King Henry III in the 1260s. Meanwhile, Philip’s son from his first marriage inherited his father’s French lands and went on crusade to Tunis with King Louis IX of France; his children by his second wife emerged as major figures in Syrian and Cypriot affairs. This kind of transregional operating can be found among many other noble families, but the Montforts illustrate the phenomenon especially well. Thus, this paper uses them as a case study for investigating how the manifold activities of the Francophone nobility linked together northern Europe and the Mediterranean in the High Middle Ages.