Cecilia of France
Overview
Biography
(See also Genealogical Table(s): 2, 2.4.1.)
Cecilia was an illegitimate daughter of king Philip I of France and Bertrade of Montfort, wife of Fulk IV, count of Anjou and mother of Fulk, king of Jerusalem. Cecilia was married to Tancred, prince of Galilee and regent, later prince, of Antioch, in 1106. Before Tancred’s death, in 1112, he asked Pons of Tripoli to marry his young widow. There was some dispute about her dower with Roger of Salerno, prince of Antioch – she claimed Jabala, but accepted instead Chastel Rouge (Rugia) and Arzghan (Arcicanum), making Pons, according to Runciman (History of the Crusades, 2.188, citing Wm of Tyre), “one of the great barons of the Antiochene principality.” Cecilia met King Fulk, her half-brother, at Sidon in 1133, to tell him her husband had been ambushed by Turcomans and had fled to the castle of Montferrand. Fulk rescued him and soon thereafter, their son, Pons’s heir, Raymond II, married queen Melisende’s sister Hodierna, and their daughter Agnes married a son of Fulk’s constable at Antioch, Reynald Mazoir of Marqab.