A Re-Examination of the Life and Reign of Isabella II, Empress of Rome and Queen of Jerusalem & Sicily (r.1225–1228)

Isabella II (d.1228)—Queen of Jerusalem by blood as the daughter of Queen Maria (d.1212) and John of Brienne, and Empress-Queen of Rome and Sicily by marriage as the second wife of Frederick II—remains a marginalized figure in the history of the Latin East. When she is mentioned, focus is typically on Isabella’s early death in childbirth at age sixteen, or rumors of her mistreatment by Frederick II. This paper presents a new interpretation of Isabella II’s reign by following her Mediterranean-wide itinerary through Acre, Tyre, possibly Cyprus, Brindisi, Foggia, Salerno, Sicily, Otranto, and Andria. Identification of Isabella’s itinerary for the first time not only demonstrates that Isabella traveled alongside Frederick as part of his itinerant court, but also functions methodologically as a temporal and spatial window into different periods of her reign. Following Isabella’s itinerary reveals that she was, in many ways, like other medieval queens: Isabella II was mobile, owned land, possessed personal networks made up of people and communities, and utilized her own seal. In short, rather than treating Isabella II as a young, immature bride, this paper repositions Isabella as a legitimate medieval queen, arguing that she was meaningfully embedded in the politics of the early thirteenth-century Mediterranean. 

Ana C. Núñez is a PhD candidate in Medieval History at Stanford University, and a Digital Public Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.