Faucigny

The Assises of Jerusalem are collections of laws which describe the institutions of the Royaume of Jerusalem and which were used and adapted for the Royaume of Cyprus. These laws of the kingdom, initially in written and dispersed forms, were joined together in collection during the 12th century.

The collections of laws which reached us are:

the Book with the King . It is the oldest text, written in the neighborhoods of 1200 for the king Amaury II, from the resolutely royalist point of view. It is the only text establishing the preeminence of the king Baudouin II, enabling him to disinherit its vassal, without taking account of the opinion of the High-Court. Apart from this position, the text is very similar to the others.

the book of Philippe de Novare, written about 1250. It is characterized by its aristocratic point of view and also contains a history of the conflict which opposed Ibelin, its guards, and Hohenstaufen in the kingdoms of Cyprus and Midsummer's Day d' Acre.

the book of Jean d' Ibelin. Count de Jaffa and of Ascalon, regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem to Acre, it is one of the belligerents of the fight described by Philippe de Novare. Between 1264 and 1266, it writes most complete and most detailed of the treaties of laws of the Latin East, and also of medieval Europe.

Geoffroy or Georges the Wrong and Jacques d' Ibelin, the son of Jean, wrote each one of very small treaties, which are much less important than monumental works of Philippe de Novare and Jean d' Ibelin.

the Book of Sat Court of the Middle-class men . It is a great work detailing the Court of the Middle-class men, established in the kingdom for the nonnoble Latin Christians. Its author is unknown, but it was also written during XIIIe century.

Another important text, although it is included in the Livre with the King and the treaties of Philippe de Novare and Jean d' Ibelin is the Assise on the ligece , a law promulgated by Amaury Ier of Jerusalem about 1170, which made each lord of the vassal kingdom direct of the king and who gave to back-vassal right to vote identical to the principal barons. Although no law or minutes of judgment dating from the apogee of the kingdom at the 12th century reached us, the kingdom had a whole of very developed laws and a legal system. During XIIIe century the details of these structures were forgotten, but the lawyers like Philippe and Jean report the legends which developed since the first times of the kingdom. According to them, the High court and the Court of the Middle-class men were founded by Godefroy de Bouillon in 1099, which proclaimed itself as the judge of the High court. The laws of the two assemblies were written at the beginning of the year 1099, and were lost when Jerusalem was taken by Saladin in 1187. The laws were preserved in a trunk in the Church of Holy Sepulchre and are of this fact known as the Letres dou Sepulcre . This trunk could be open only by the king, the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Viscount of Jerusalem. Each law was written on a sheet, starting with a large enluminée reference letter of gold and with a heading written in red. Philippe claiming to hold this information of a former knight and lawyer named Relph de Tibérias, and Jean probably obtained this information of Philippe. That these legends are true or false, the lawyers of XIIIe century regarded the legal structure of the kingdom as having been existed in continuity since the initial conquest.

The modern historians generally admit the danger to identify the laws of XIIIe century to those of XIIe century, although in the beginning one believed that bases represented the purest formalization of the European feudality of the Middle Ages. Actually, these laws represent the daily practice, neither in XIIe nor in XIIIe century, because they were récrites from zero in less disturbed times. It is thus somewhat diverting to qualify these texts d'" Sat of Jérusalem" as if they had been written simultaneously; they are often contradicted between them, and omit a point appearing in another. However, they constitute together the largest collection of laws written in a European state of this period.

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