Guy of Lusignan - in Fiction and Film

In Fiction and Film

Guy appears as main character in a tale of Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, where the censure of a Gascon lady converts the King of Cyprus from a churlish to an honourable temper.

Sir Walter Scott, in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), recounts the legend of Melusina, a supernatural creature

who married Guy de Lusignan, Count of Poitou, under condition that he should never attempt to intrude upon her privacy.... She bore the count many children, and erected for him a magnificent castle by her magical art. Their harmony was uninterrupted until the prying husband broke the conditions of their union, by concealing himself to behold his wife make use of her enchanted bath. Hardly had Melusina discovered the indiscreet intruder, than, transforming herself into a dragon, she departed with a loud yell of lamentation, and was never again visible to mortal eyes; although, even in the days of Brantome, she was supposed to be the protectress of her descendants, and was heard wailing as she sailed upon the blast round the turrets of the castle of Lusignan the night before it was demolished.

Guy has also appeared in a number of historical novels, including Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's Król trędowaty (The Leper King), Graham Shelby's The Knights of Dark Renown, and Cecelia Holland's Jerusalem, generally as a good-looking but weak and foolish young man. Ronald Welch in Knight Crusader and Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert) in The Heart of the Lion both depict him sympathetically as likable and chivalrous. Both give the misleading impression that he was younger than King Richard: he was at least several years older.

Guy is portrayed as a peace-loving elderly man, goaded into war by Raynald of Châtillon, in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1963 film Al Nasser Salah Ad-Din. Another fictionalised version of him – as an arrogant, scheming villain (and a Templar) – is played by Marton Csokas in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven. The film distorts his relationship with Sibylla, which seems to have been one of mutual loyalty; it also implies that he was her only husband, though this is corrected in the director's cut of the film.

In the historical Knights Templar Trilogy by the Swedish author Jan Guillou, Guy is depicted as a scheming, incompetent, and selfish villain accelerating the loss of the Holy Land to Saladin.