Rebellion, adultery, and romance in Frankish Jerusalem: Melisende and Hugh of Jaffa reconsidered

Sometime in the 1130s, Hugh of Jaffa rebelled against King Fulk of Jerusalem. William of Tyre states that rumors circulated at the time that Queen Melisende and Count Hugh were inappropriately close to one another. Rather than jealousy or adultery, however, most scholarship has emphasized court politics and land rights as the causes of the rebellion. This article reexamines the details of this episode and places it in the winter of 1135, a slightly later date than is currently accepted. If it did take place at that time, rumors of adultery were far more important than has been recognized, since they potentially called into question the legitimacy of the future King Amalric. The fact that Melisende and Hugh were second cousins meant that the future king may have been, according to rumor, the product of incest. Even if these stories were not true, their impact on the future of the Latin East was no less profound. They also may have helped shape trends in European literature, where tales of adulterous queens took on a sudden vogue in the later twelfth century.