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Description
For thousands of years, the island of Cyprus has been a crucial crossroad in the world of Mediterranean trade and politics. Its ludicrous abundance of natural copper ore has made it an extremely valuable resource which could put a feather in the cap of any empire who controlled it. Where we enter the story today, the empire that had been in control of the island for over a millennium was the Romans, who wrenched it out of Ptolemaic Egypt's mummified hands back in 58 BCE. As we all know, though, the Roman Empire's greatest enemy were those scheming barbarians: the Roman Empire. If you were the Roman emperor at the start of the 2nd millennium, the second your ass squelched into Constantinople's blood-stained throne, you had to watch out for literally everyone with even the tiniest familial relationship to you, because that's all it took to stake a claim and gouge your eyes out. In 1183, that emperor was Andronikos I, and the distant relative he had to worry about was Isaac Komnenos. Isaac had just been bailed out of an Armenian prison, and decided that becoming emperor himself would be the best way to pay off that debt. To accomplish this scheme, Isaac rolled up onto Cyprus with forged documentation proclaiming that actually Andronikos had totally given him the governorship over the island and it's all totally legal and anyone who questions it will have their eyes gouged out. Honestly, I don't think he needed to make it that convoluted. He could've just pulled up and said “alright. Come on. Y'all know the drill by now lmao”.

Now Isaac, like all Roman emperors worth their salt, was a debaucherous asshole who fucked and robbed his way through anything that wasn't nailed down. Andronikos was too busy getting lynched by an angry mob and overthrown by a different Isaac to really do anything about this renegade, so Isaac Komnenos was more or less free to run amuck stealing whatever he pleased. He'd only face the consequences of his actions come May 1191, when he kidnapped two babes who'd shipwrecked on his shore on their way to the Third Crusade. This was the biggest mistake of his career, because those two babes were Berengaria of Navarre and Joan of England, the fiance and sister respectively of King Richard the Lionheart. When Richard found out about this, he was, understandably, pissed off, and he made his frustration very clear by completely laying waste to the island of Cyprus and forcing Isaac down on his knees begging like a little bitch not to be put in iron chains. Richard, quite smugly, granted Isaac his request… and put him in silver chains instead. All things being equal, Isaac actually got off pretty lightly. Garnier de Nablus, Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, had convinced Richard that “heyyy man look, the total destruction of Cyprus is a biiit much don't you think?” so Richard decided “fine, but he's your problem now”. Isaac was therefore made a hostage of the Knights Hospitaller in their fortress at Margat, never to hold any real power ever again.

So alright, Richard was king of Cyprus now, cool! Except no, not cool, because Richard didn't come all this way to be king of Cyprus. He'd come all this way to give Saladin a noogie. He'd much rather have the 100,000 bezants he'd make selling Cyprus off to the Knights Templar as a sackful of quick cash to finance his crusade than this pesky island taking up space in his storage closet somewhere. There was just one glaring problem: the Templars didn't actually have 100,000 bezants. They gave Richard a down payment of 40,000, and intended to raise the remaining 60% by taxing the shit out of the Cypriots. By this point, the indigenous population had frankly had enough of this bullshit. In April 1192, they revolted against the small squadron of Templars left behind to garrison Lefkosia and successfully sent their commander, Armand Bouchart, scurrying away to whine to his Grand Master that wah wah governing Cyprus was just too hard boo hoo. The Templars therefore had to sell the island back to Richard there and then, but Richard still had about as much interest in being king of Cyprus as he did being king of England. In fact, by this point, he'd kinda tuckered himself out wrestling with his best frenemy and just wanted to go home to his beloved Aquitaine. To that end, Richard brought in his buddy Guy de Lusignan to rule the island, because Guy had just gotten screwed out of being King of Jerusalem, and he could really use a win.

Guy arrived in Nicosia in May, but he never quite settled in, because Richard’s own nephew Henry of Champagne was now sitting in his fancy chair back in Jerusalem, and that really rubbed Guy the wrong way. He did still have one connection left after everyone else just sort of ditched him in the Holy Land: his brother Aimery was still the Constable of Jerusalem under Henry, and he had some sway over the Pisan merchant class in Acre, so if they bonked their heads together then maybe they could figure out a way to overthrow Henry. Maybe. We'll never know, though. Henry could smell that rat from a thousand miles away, and locked Aimery up in a dungeon in 1193. Insufficient evidence got Aimery released after just a few days, but it was clear that any plot the brothers might’ve concocted would've been spotted like a crow in the snow. Unlike his brother, who continued to demand he be referred to as “King of Jerusalem” until his dying day in 1194, Aimery knew when to cut his losses, and popped over to Cyprus after his release, whereupon he ultimately succeeded his brother as king of the island.

Now Aimery was unique for a crusader, you know, in that he actually saw the value in forming alliances with the people that you're supposed to be on the same damn side of. I know, such revolutionary thinking. Rebelling against Henry clearly wasn't going to be profitable, so instead he forged an alliance with the King of Jerusalem, going so far as to betrothe his three sons to Henry's daughters. This tact and good will earned him enough favor that when Henry died falling out of a window in 1197, the nobles called him back over to Acre to marry Henry's widow, Isabella (the one through whom the crown actually passed). On paper, this technically made Aimery king of Jerusalem, but that wasn't anywhere near as important to him as it was to Guy. Instead, he humbly considered himself the regent for Isabella's young daughter Maria, and focused more on getting the affairs of both realms all tidied up than securing power for himself. As regent of Jerusalem, Aimery secured two extensive peace treaties with the Ayyubid Muslims, one in 1198 and another in 1204, which gave both states the desperately needed breathing room to recover after so much war and devastation. As king of Cyprus, meanwhile, he found the balance with the largely Greek Orthodox population which the Templars had failed to achieve, granting them the right to worship as they pleased while still giving Latin Catholic immigrants a share of their own land which everyone could be happy with. Aimery was just a really chill dude, and I appreciate that. He ultimately died from food poisoning after what I can only hope was one hell of a kickass party in 1205, and Isabella followed him just four days later. The crown of Jerusalem was passed to Maria, while the crown of Cyprus went to Aimery's son Hugh.

Both Hugh and Maria were minors upon the deaths of their parents, however, and as such were supervised by their respective regents. Hugh's brother-in-law, Walter of Montbéliard, was assigned regency over Cyprus, while Maria's disturbingly-decades-older husband John of Brienne was assigned regency over Jerusalem. Once Hugh came of age in 1210, however, he immediately outed Walter as a scheming weasel who neglected his charge and just used Cyprus as his own personal piggy bank. Hugh demanded his parasitic relative either pay up or get the fuck out of his life forever. I relate to that, and as such I know from personal experience that those types of relatives would rather get the hell out of dodge than pay back a single cent of what they stole. Walter slinked away to the safety of John of Brienne's court, and that grant of sanctuary pretty much undid the very delicate Jenga tower Aimery had set up. When the Fifth Crusade was called in 1217 to try and reclaim what was lost to the Ayyubids, Hugh dipped the fuck out like no no no, screw you old man, I've got zero obligation to bail you out when you bite off more than you can chew. Indeed, the Fifth Crusade ended up being a total wet fart which I've already scratched my head over in previous blurbs. Hugh meanwhile caught some sort of bug at his sister's wedding and passed away surrounded by loved ones in 1218. I'd count that as a victory, personally.

Hugh was succeeded by his infant son Henry. While technically this meant he would be placed under the regency of his mother Alice, she deferred pretty much all of those duties to her uncle, Philip d'Ibelin. In spite of this, Alice still liked to stick her fingers in the pie, really pushing hard to get the Greek Orthodox tithes transferred over to the Latin Church. Philip, however, put his foot down, because that would've been an arrogantly suicidal idea. The common folk barely tolerated the presence of these Catholic frogs ruling their island as is, and interfering with their Church would be an irreconcilable PR disaster that could get them kicked off the island. This heated Thanksgiving dinner sort of argument eventually led to Alice fucking off the island entirely in 1224, only to come back after getting hitched to a dopey prince from Antioch whom she tried to get appointed as Philip's replacement. The noble court was having none of that bullshit, though. Philip not only had a solid head on his shoulders, but he'd also defended Limassol from an Ayyubid invasion during the Fifth Crusade. His service to Cyprus pretty much guaranteed he would remain Henry's trusted caretaker until Philip passed away in 1227, passing the regency onto his brother, John of Beirut.

Now John also had a good head on his shoulders, and indeed had valuable experience as Maria of Jerusalem's guardian before this gig. Even the greatest chess masters can find themselves in checkmate, though. See, technically speaking, Cyprus was a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire, as per the terms of Richard the Lionheart's release from captivity back in 1194. So, when Emperor Frederick II pulled up on his way to the Sixth Crusade in 1228, he naturally expected his tribute. That in itself wasn't an unreasonable request, so John accepted the invite to dinner to discuss terms. Unfortunately, Frederick II wanted a little bit more than his fair share, so he locked the doors to the banquet, surrounded the diplomacy table with armed men, and demanded that John fork over not just the island's treasury, but also the regency itself. With a sharp metal object at his back, John had little choice but to cede the young king into the whims of the Emperor. The poor kid had an absolutely miserable time being tossed back and forth between nobles who just saw their new ward as a nose-picking bank account. John, for his part, set about planning a rescue mission as soon as there wasn't a sword at his neck. In 1229, his troops marched on Nicosia and reestablished control over the island, then in 1230 they besieged the castle of St. Hilarion, successfully regaining custody of the king. Eternally grateful and forever in his uncle's debt, Henry lent the full force of the Cypriot army to face the Emperor's army head on in Beirut, which had been captured in retaliation, and while that excursion didn't go as planned, and the duo had to return to Cyprus in 1232 to suppress a cabal of treasonous noblemen, the power of family and friendship ultimately won out. The major fortresses on Cyprus were recaptured, the traitors were tried for their crimes against king and country, and the island was finally secured against the influence of that meddling Holy Roman Emperor.

Henry was therefore free to reign long and prosperously until his death in 1254. He was succeeded by his son, Hugh II, but sadly Hugh had barely made it out of puberty when he died in 1267. Being so young meant Hugh obviously had no heirs of his own, so the throne passed to Hugh III, his cousin through Henry's sister Isabella. Hugh III is most historically significant for being elected the next King of Jerusalem following the beheading of Conradin in 1268, which finally united the crowns of Cyprus and Jerusalem under one banner. Okay sure, the actual city of Jerusalem itself had been ransacked and captured by the Khwarazmians all the way back in 1244, and would not be in Christian hands for the entire rest of human history, but hey, I guess as long as we keep up the charade, it'll keep the ghost of Guy de Lusignan happy. On paper, finally uniting the Kingdom of Jerusalem's two rival dynasties sounds like it'd be a great boon, especially when they were up against a Muslim front now united under the Mamluk Sultan Baybars. But… no. Of course not. That's not how the Outremer works. The Eighth Crusade shat the bed when King Louis IX of France died of dysentery before the fighting could even begin. Hugh meanwhile had grown so sick of the unresolvable infighting in the court of Jerusalem that he fucked off back to Cyprus in 1276, only returning to the mainland when rival claimant Charles I of Anjou challenged his authority by taking Acre from him. Upon Hugh's death in 1284, this rivalry was passed first to his son John (who reigned for only a year), and then to his other son Henry II. Henry recovered Acre after the death of Charles in 1285, but it became a null victory when Baybars rolled up and took the city back for Islam in 1291. As this was the very last city the Kingdom of Jerusalem held, the state was effectively abolished. The kings of Cyprus continued to style themselves as rulers of Jerusalem for the next couple centuries, but from an academic perspective, this is considered the death of the last Crusader state. Fucking finally.

In 1303, Henry had his brother Guy executed for conspiring with the Knights Templar to overthrow him. The Templars had actually been allowed to retain their castles on Cyprus under the Lusignans, with Limassol in particular being the hub for their Grand Masters since the fall of Jerusalem. Now though, they were biting the hand that fed them. In 1306, in conjunction with Henry's other brother Amalric, they exiled the king from his own throne. They might’ve been able to revive Armand Bouchart’s pipe dream were it not for the fact that King Philip IV and his pet Pope Clement V were gunning for their asses and the sweet sweet piles of gold those asses were enthroned on. Once all the Templars got rounded up in 1307 to be burnt at the stake, Amalric realized he was kinda fucked. In a desperate bid to secure his power, he tried locking Henry up in an Armenian jail in 1310, only to be assassinated just three months later. Henry made sure to confiscate any remaining Templar property on Cyprus and divert it to the Knights Hospitaller, though he really didn't trust those old fogies either, so he pretty much just pointed them at the island of Rhodes and told them to shoo.

Henry reigned until he died childless in 1324, passing the throne to his nephew, Hugh IV. Despite reigning all the way up until 1358, I can't find a damn word about this man's biography outside of who he married his kids off to. He apparently wasn't a family man, that much was clear. He had an extremely strained relationship with his grandson, which is the exact opposite situation you want to find yourself in when that grandson is one of the primary heirs to your throne. To circumvent this, Hugh abdicated in favor of his son Peter, and then promptly died a year later to avoid the consequences of his actions. Peter ended up being a bit of an insufferable twerp. From a military perspective, he was pretty capable, even capturing Alexandria in 1365, but he failed to gather support for a large-scale campaign in the Holy Land because everyone in Europe was just a teensy bit preoccupied with half the continent's entire population being wiped out from either the Hundred Years’ War or the Black Death. Meanwhile, the only favor being a total dick to his noblemen got him was a knife in the back in 1369, signaling to anyone who still had any doubts that the days of Deus-vulting across Jerusalem belonged in the ground six feet deep with all the other flea-bitten corpses that were piling up.

That theme of decline came to define the reign of his son and successor, Peter II. This kid's mother, Eleanor of Aragon, didn't trust a single person in her court, so as regent she invited the Genoese to come in as a political balance. Unfortunately, this backfired stupendously in 1372, when the Genoese on the island got into a fight with the Venetians over some dumb ceremonial thing during Peter's coronation. This fight turned into a brawl, which turned into a riot, which turned into all-out warfare on Cyprus. While the main force retreated in 1375, a Genoese garrison would loom over the throne from the harbor at Famagusta for most of the remainder of the kingdom's history. Peter himself mostly kept his head down until he died in 1382, at which point the Genoese allowed his captive uncle James out of the closet so that he could assume the crown. They could afford it, since they had James's son Janus locked up in that same closet ready to replace his father in 1398. Janus spent most of his time pathetically banging his head against Famagusta hoping something would finally give, but then the Mamluks invaded Limassol in 1426 and both factions on the island realized oh yeah, we're still technically a crusader state. Maybe we should like… join forces against a common enemy or something.

Well, no wonder the crusader states never cooperated with one another. Fat lot of good it did them here! Janus was captured by the Mamluks and the island was basically razed to the ground. Janus died of humiliation in 1432, meaning it was his son John’s turn to try and clean everything up. He did not. He pissed away his reign and then died in 1458, leaving the throne to be fought over between his legitimate daughter Charlotte and his illegitimate son James. When James ultimately became the one to finally boot the Genoese out of Famagusta and Kyrenia in 1464, the crown was effectively his, and Charlotte fled into exile. A man of brass tax, James arranged his marriage to Venetian noblewoman named Catherine Cornaro in 1468, producing a son in 1473. James died just a month before the birth of his child, however, and then the poor kid died just a couple weeks after his first birthday. That left Catherine as the last legitimate monarch remaining. Being woefully unprepared for that Herculean task, Catherine called in her Venetian cousins to help manage the affairs of state. By 1489 though, it had become obvious that those cousins were the real ones in charge, and Catherine was in no position to resist when the Venetians forced her to abdicate her throne and sell the island off to the Doge. Catherine set sail out of Famagusta in a precession of tears, and Cyprus would henceforth be nothing more than a colony of the Republic of Venice until 1571, when we at last come full circle and the island returned to the possession of the Roman Empire under Sultan Selim II. Such is the way that history turns.

Design notes, uuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhyep. Yep yep yep. I knew this was gonna happen. I knew I was setting myself up for this when I decided to make the Kingdom of Jerusalem its own faction sheet. I knew that if I set the standard that every little micronation is eligible for a sheet then I'd run into the issue of finding virtually no reference material in the historical record to draw from and I'd have to extrapolate four whole designs out of whatever scraps I could find only to feel like the end result is a disjointed mess that I'm not satisfied with. Oh well, I made my bed, I guess I have to lie in it. Idk, I guess it's not that fugly. I think on their own, each of these designs works decent enough, they just don't really feel like they jive together as a unit aside from the colors they share. If I wanna be nice to myself, I do think the regular and the elite synergize well with each other, and those are the two primary uniforms I'll normally use in a drawing anyway, so it's not a total failure. I don't often wanna be nice to myself tho, so it's still going to bug the shit out of me.

Description
For thousands of years, the island of Cyprus has been a crucial crossroad in the world of Mediterranean trade and politics. Its ludicrous abundance of natural copper ore has made it an extremely valuable resource which could put a feather in the cap of any empire who controlled it. Where we enter the story today, the empire that had been in control of the island for over a millennium was the Romans, who wrenched it out of Ptolemaic Egypt's mummified hands back in 58 BCE. As we all know, though, the Roman Empire's greatest enemy were those scheming barbarians: the Roman Empire. If you were the Roman emperor at the start of the 2nd millennium, the second your ass squelched into Constantinople's blood-stained throne, you had to watch out for literally everyone with even the tiniest familial relationship to you, because that's all it took to stake a claim and gouge your eyes out. In 1183, that emperor was Andronikos I, and the distant relative he had to worry about was Isaac Komnenos. Isaac had just been bailed out of an Armenian prison, and decided that becoming emperor himself would be the best way to pay off that debt. To accomplish this scheme, Isaac rolled up onto Cyprus with forged documentation proclaiming that actually Andronikos had totally given him the governorship over the island and it's all totally legal and anyone who questions it will have their eyes gouged out. Honestly, I don't think he needed to make it that convoluted. He could've just pulled up and said “alright. Come on. Y'all know the drill by now lmao”.

Now Isaac, like all Roman emperors worth their salt, was a debaucherous asshole who fucked and robbed his way through anything that wasn't nailed down. Andronikos was too busy getting lynched by an angry mob and overthrown by a different Isaac to really do anything about this renegade, so Isaac Komnenos was more or less free to run amuck stealing whatever he pleased. He'd only face the consequences of his actions come May 1191, when he kidnapped two babes who'd shipwrecked on his shore on their way to the Third Crusade. This was the biggest mistake of his career, because those two babes were Berengaria of Navarre and Joan of England, the fiance and sister respectively of King Richard the Lionheart. When Richard found out about this, he was, understandably, pissed off, and he made his frustration very clear by completely laying waste to the island of Cyprus and forcing Isaac down on his knees begging like a little bitch not to be put in iron chains. Richard, quite smugly, granted Isaac his request… and put him in silver chains instead. All things being equal, Isaac actually got off pretty lightly. Garnier de Nablus, Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller, had convinced Richard that “heyyy man look, the total destruction of Cyprus is a biiit much don't you think?” so Richard decided “fine, but he's your problem now”. Isaac was therefore made a hostage of the Knights Hospitaller in their fortress at Margat, never to hold any real power ever again.

So alright, Richard was king of Cyprus now, cool! Except no, not cool, because Richard didn't come all this way to be king of Cyprus. He'd come all this way to give Saladin a noogie. He'd much rather have the 100,000 bezants he'd make selling Cyprus off to the Knights Templar as a sackful of quick cash to finance his crusade than this pesky island taking up space in his storage closet somewhere. There was just one glaring problem: the Templars didn't actually have 100,000 bezants. They gave Richard a down payment of 40,000, and intended to raise the remaining 60% by taxing the shit out of the Cypriots. By this point, the indigenous population had frankly had enough of this bullshit. In April 1192, they revolted against the small squadron of Templars left behind to garrison Lefkosia and successfully sent their commander, Armand Bouchart, scurrying away to whine to his Grand Master that wah wah governing Cyprus was just too hard boo hoo. The Templars therefore had to sell the island back to Richard there and then, but Richard still had about as much interest in being king of Cyprus as he did being king of England. In fact, by this point, he'd kinda tuckered himself out wrestling with his best frenemy and just wanted to go home to his beloved Aquitaine. To that end, Richard brought in his buddy Guy de Lusignan to rule the island, because Guy had just gotten screwed out of being King of Jerusalem, and he could really use a win.

Guy arrived in Nicosia in May, but he never quite settled in, because Richard’s own nephew Henry of Champagne was now sitting in his fancy chair back in Jerusalem, and that really rubbed Guy the wrong way. He did still have one connection left after everyone else just sort of ditched him in the Holy Land: his brother Aimery was still the Constable of Jerusalem under Henry, and he had some sway over the Pisan merchant class in Acre, so if they bonked their heads together then maybe they could figure out a way to overthrow Henry. Maybe. We'll never know, though. Henry could smell that rat from a thousand miles away, and locked Aimery up in a dungeon in 1193. Insufficient evidence got Aimery released after just a few days, but it was clear that any plot the brothers might’ve concocted would've been spotted like a crow in the snow. Unlike his brother, who continued to demand he be referred to as “King of Jerusalem” until his dying day in 1194, Aimery knew when to cut his losses, and popped over to Cyprus after his release, whereupon he ultimately succeeded his brother as king of the island.

Now Aimery was unique for a crusader, you know, in that he actually saw the value in forming alliances with the people that you're supposed to be on the same damn side of. I know, such revolutionary thinking. Rebelling against Henry clearly wasn't going to be profitable, so instead he forged an alliance with the King of Jerusalem, going so far as to betrothe his three sons to Henry's daughters. This tact and good will earned him enough favor that when Henry died falling out of a window in 1197, the nobles called him back over to Acre to marry Henry's widow, Isabella (the one through whom the crown actually passed). On paper, this technically made Aimery king of Jerusalem, but that wasn't anywhere near as important to him as it was to Guy. Instead, he humbly considered himself the regent for Isabella's young daughter Maria, and focused more on getting the affairs of both realms all tidied up than securing power for himself. As regent of Jerusalem, Aimery secured two extensive peace treaties with the Ayyubid Muslims, one in 1198 and another in 1204, which gave both states the desperately needed breathing room to recover after so much war and devastation. As king of Cyprus, meanwhile, he found the balance with the largely Greek Orthodox population which the Templars had failed to achieve, granting them the right to worship as they pleased while still giving Latin Catholic immigrants a share of their own land which everyone could be happy with. Aimery was just a really chill dude, and I appreciate that. He ultimately died from food poisoning after what I can only hope was one hell of a kickass party in 1205, and Isabella followed him just four days later. The crown of Jerusalem was passed to Maria, while the crown of Cyprus went to Aimery's son Hugh.

Both Hugh and Maria were minors upon the deaths of their parents, however, and as such were supervised by their respective regents. Hugh's brother-in-law, Walter of Montbéliard, was assigned regency over Cyprus, while Maria's disturbingly-decades-older husband John of Brienne was assigned regency over Jerusalem. Once Hugh came of age in 1210, however, he immediately outed Walter as a scheming weasel who neglected his charge and just used Cyprus as his own personal piggy bank. Hugh demanded his parasitic relative either pay up or get the fuck out of his life forever. I relate to that, and as such I know from personal experience that those types of relatives would rather get the hell out of dodge than pay back a single cent of what they stole. Walter slinked away to the safety of John of Brienne's court, and that grant of sanctuary pretty much undid the very delicate Jenga tower Aimery had set up. When the Fifth Crusade was called in 1217 to try and reclaim what was lost to the Ayyubids, Hugh dipped the fuck out like no no no, screw you old man, I've got zero obligation to bail you out when you bite off more than you can chew. Indeed, the Fifth Crusade ended up being a total wet fart which I've already scratched my head over in previous blurbs. Hugh meanwhile caught some sort of bug at his sister's wedding and passed away surrounded by loved ones in 1218. I'd count that as a victory, personally.

Hugh was succeeded by his infant son Henry. While technically this meant he would be placed under the regency of his mother Alice, she deferred pretty much all of those duties to her uncle, Philip d'Ibelin. In spite of this, Alice still liked to stick her fingers in the pie, really pushing hard to get the Greek Orthodox tithes transferred over to the Latin Church. Philip, however, put his foot down, because that would've been an arrogantly suicidal idea. The common folk barely tolerated the presence of these Catholic frogs ruling their island as is, and interfering with their Church would be an irreconcilable PR disaster that could get them kicked off the island. This heated Thanksgiving dinner sort of argument eventually led to Alice fucking off the island entirely in 1224, only to come back after getting hitched to a dopey prince from Antioch whom she tried to get appointed as Philip's replacement. The noble court was having none of that bullshit, though. Philip not only had a solid head on his shoulders, but he'd also defended Limassol from an Ayyubid invasion during the Fifth Crusade. His service to Cyprus pretty much guaranteed he would remain Henry's trusted caretaker until Philip passed away in 1227, passing the regency onto his brother, John of Beirut.

Now John also had a good head on his shoulders, and indeed had valuable experience as Maria of Jerusalem's guardian before this gig. Even the greatest chess masters can find themselves in checkmate, though. See, technically speaking, Cyprus was a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire, as per the terms of Richard the Lionheart's release from captivity back in 1194. So, when Emperor Frederick II pulled up on his way to the Sixth Crusade in 1228, he naturally expected his tribute. That in itself wasn't an unreasonable request, so John accepted the invite to dinner to discuss terms. Unfortunately, Frederick II wanted a little bit more than his fair share, so he locked the doors to the banquet, surrounded the diplomacy table with armed men, and demanded that John fork over not just the island's treasury, but also the regency itself. With a sharp metal object at his back, John had little choice but to cede the young king into the whims of the Emperor. The poor kid had an absolutely miserable time being tossed back and forth between nobles who just saw their new ward as a nose-picking bank account. John, for his part, set about planning a rescue mission as soon as there wasn't a sword at his neck. In 1229, his troops marched on Nicosia and reestablished control over the island, then in 1230 they besieged the castle of St. Hilarion, successfully regaining custody of the king. Eternally grateful and forever in his uncle's debt, Henry lent the full force of the Cypriot army to face the Emperor's army head on in Beirut, which had been captured in retaliation, and while that excursion didn't go as planned, and the duo had to return to Cyprus in 1232 to suppress a cabal of treasonous noblemen, the power of family and friendship ultimately won out. The major fortresses on Cyprus were recaptured, the traitors were tried for their crimes against king and country, and the island was finally secured against the influence of that meddling Holy Roman Emperor.

Henry was therefore free to reign long and prosperously until his death in 1254. He was succeeded by his son, Hugh II, but sadly Hugh had barely made it out of puberty when he died in 1267. Being so young meant Hugh obviously had no heirs of his own, so the throne passed to Hugh III, his cousin through Henry's sister Isabella. Hugh III is most historically significant for being elected the next King of Jerusalem following the beheading of Conradin in 1268, which finally united the crowns of Cyprus and Jerusalem under one banner. Okay sure, the actual city of Jerusalem itself had been ransacked and captured by the Khwarazmians all the way back in 1244, and would not be in Christian hands for the entire rest of human history, but hey, I guess as long as we keep up the charade, it'll keep the ghost of Guy de Lusignan happy. On paper, finally uniting the Kingdom of Jerusalem's two rival dynasties sounds like it'd be a great boon, especially when they were up against a Muslim front now united under the Mamluk Sultan Baybars. But… no. Of course not. That's not how the Outremer works. The Eighth Crusade shat the bed when King Louis IX of France died of dysentery before the fighting could even begin. Hugh meanwhile had grown so sick of the unresolvable infighting in the court of Jerusalem that he fucked off back to Cyprus in 1276, only returning to the mainland when rival claimant Charles I of Anjou challenged his authority by taking Acre from him. Upon Hugh's death in 1284, this rivalry was passed first to his son John (who reigned for only a year), and then to his other son Henry II. Henry recovered Acre after the death of Charles in 1285, but it became a null victory when Baybars rolled up and took the city back for Islam in 1291. As this was the very last city the Kingdom of Jerusalem held, the state was effectively abolished. The kings of Cyprus continued to style themselves as rulers of Jerusalem for the next couple centuries, but from an academic perspective, this is considered the death of the last Crusader state. Fucking finally.

In 1303, Henry had his brother Guy executed for conspiring with the Knights Templar to overthrow him. The Templars had actually been allowed to retain their castles on Cyprus under the Lusignans, with Limassol in particular being the hub for their Grand Masters since the fall of Jerusalem. Now though, they were biting the hand that fed them. In 1306, in conjunction with Henry's other brother Amalric, they exiled the king from his own throne. They might’ve been able to revive Armand Bouchart’s pipe dream were it not for the fact that King Philip IV and his pet Pope Clement V were gunning for their asses and the sweet sweet piles of gold those asses were enthroned on. Once all the Templars got rounded up in 1307 to be burnt at the stake, Amalric realized he was kinda fucked. In a desperate bid to secure his power, he tried locking Henry up in an Armenian jail in 1310, only to be assassinated just three months later. Henry made sure to confiscate any remaining Templar property on Cyprus and divert it to the Knights Hospitaller, though he really didn't trust those old fogies either, so he pretty much just pointed them at the island of Rhodes and told them to shoo.

Henry reigned until he died childless in 1324, passing the throne to his nephew, Hugh IV. Despite reigning all the way up until 1358, I can't find a damn word about this man's biography outside of who he married his kids off to. He apparently wasn't a family man, that much was clear. He had an extremely strained relationship with his grandson, which is the exact opposite situation you want to find yourself in when that grandson is one of the primary heirs to your throne. To circumvent this, Hugh abdicated in favor of his son Peter, and then promptly died a year later to avoid the consequences of his actions. Peter ended up being a bit of an insufferable twerp. From a military perspective, he was pretty capable, even capturing Alexandria in 1365, but he failed to gather support for a large-scale campaign in the Holy Land because everyone in Europe was just a teensy bit preoccupied with half the continent's entire population being wiped out from either the Hundred Years’ War or the Black Death. Meanwhile, the only favor being a total dick to his noblemen got him was a knife in the back in 1369, signaling to anyone who still had any doubts that the days of Deus-vulting across Jerusalem belonged in the ground six feet deep with all the other flea-bitten corpses that were piling up.

That theme of decline came to define the reign of his son and successor, Peter II. This kid's mother, Eleanor of Aragon, didn't trust a single person in her court, so as regent she invited the Genoese to come in as a political balance. Unfortunately, this backfired stupendously in 1372, when the Genoese on the island got into a fight with the Venetians over some dumb ceremonial thing during Peter's coronation. This fight turned into a brawl, which turned into a riot, which turned into all-out warfare on Cyprus. While the main force retreated in 1375, a Genoese garrison would loom over the throne from the harbor at Famagusta for most of the remainder of the kingdom's history. Peter himself mostly kept his head down until he died in 1382, at which point the Genoese allowed his captive uncle James out of the closet so that he could assume the crown. They could afford it, since they had James's son Janus locked up in that same closet ready to replace his father in 1398. Janus spent most of his time pathetically banging his head against Famagusta hoping something would finally give, but then the Mamluks invaded Limassol in 1426 and both factions on the island realized oh yeah, we're still technically a crusader state. Maybe we should like… join forces against a common enemy or something.

Well, no wonder the crusader states never cooperated with one another. Fat lot of good it did them here! Janus was captured by the Mamluks and the island was basically razed to the ground. Janus died of humiliation in 1432, meaning it was his son John’s turn to try and clean everything up. He did not. He pissed away his reign and then died in 1458, leaving the throne to be fought over between his legitimate daughter Charlotte and his illegitimate son James. When James ultimately became the one to finally boot the Genoese out of Famagusta and Kyrenia in 1464, the crown was effectively his, and Charlotte fled into exile. A man of brass tax, James arranged his marriage to Venetian noblewoman named Catherine Cornaro in 1468, producing a son in 1473. James died just a month before the birth of his child, however, and then the poor kid died just a couple weeks after his first birthday. That left Catherine as the last legitimate monarch remaining. Being woefully unprepared for that Herculean task, Catherine called in her Venetian cousins to help manage the affairs of state. By 1489 though, it had become obvious that those cousins were the real ones in charge, and Catherine was in no position to resist when the Venetians forced her to abdicate her throne and sell the island off to the Doge. Catherine set sail out of Famagusta in a precession of tears, and Cyprus would henceforth be nothing more than a colony of the Republic of Venice until 1571, when we at last come full circle and the island returned to the possession of the Roman Empire under Sultan Selim II. Such is the way that history turns.

Design notes, uuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhyep. Yep yep yep. I knew this was gonna happen. I knew I was setting myself up for this when I decided to make the Kingdom of Jerusalem its own faction sheet. I knew that if I set the standard that every little micronation is eligible for a sheet then I'd run into the issue of finding virtually no reference material in the historical record to draw from and I'd have to extrapolate four whole designs out of whatever scraps I could find only to feel like the end result is a disjointed mess that I'm not satisfied with. Oh well, I made my bed, I guess I have to lie in it. Idk, I guess it's not that fugly. I think on their own, each of these designs works decent enough, they just don't really feel like they jive together as a unit aside from the colors they share. If I wanna be nice to myself, I do think the regular and the elite synergize well with each other, and those are the two primary uniforms I'll normally use in a drawing anyway, so it's not a total failure. I don't often wanna be nice to myself tho, so it's still going to bug the shit out of me.