The following five years of Isabella’s life may have been amongst her happiest. She gave birth to Montferrat’s posthumous daughter, who she named after her mother, Maria. She also gave Champagne three daughters, Marguerite, Alice and Philippa; the latter two lived to adulthood. Because of the truce with Saladin, the kingdom was at peace, and the first steps towards economic recovery were possible. As the ceasefire neared its end, large contingents of crusaders started to arrive to the Holy Land in anticipation of a crusade led by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Although the emperor died before he reached the Holy Land, German nobles and knights succeeded in recapturing the important coastal city of Beirut and, with it, established Frankish control of the entire coastline from Arsur (Jaffa had since been lost again) to the County of Tripoli. Perhaps because they were still hoping to recapture Jerusalem, Isabella and Henri had not been ceremoniously crowned and anointed, yet they were otherwise treated as king and queen.

In a freak accident, Henri de Champagne tragically died falling from a balcony (or when the balcony or its railing collapsed), leaving Isabella a widow in October 1197. Henri was just 31 at his death, and his widow Isabella was 25.

Again, as an adult widow and reigning queen, Isabella could have insisted on her right to remain single. It is unlikely that the barons would have taken action against her had she asserted her rights. Yet Isabella was a queen first and a woman second. She knew that her kingdom was still exceedingly vulnerable. Only weeks before, Saladin’s brother al-Adil had been threatening at the gates of Acre; his army had barely been beaten off by the German crusaders and Isabella’s army. Now his forces had seized Jaffa. She did not have the luxury to mourn or vacillate if she wanted to have a kingdom. The kingdom needed a strong king capable of defending it.

Isabella’s choice – and it was undoubtedly her choice – fell on a man whom she had known long and well, namely Aimery de Lusignan, the older brother of her sister’s disgraced consort Guy. Aimery had come to the Holy Land earlier than Guy. He had been appointed constable in the reign of Baldwin IV. For roughly thirty years, he had been married to her step-father’s niece, Eschiva d’Ibelin. But Eschiva had recently died, leaving Aimery a widower with several young children. Furthermore, Aimery had succeeded his brother as lord of Cyprus, a rich island with substantial resources that would be of use to Jerusalem. Last but not least, in a savvy move, Aimery had done homage for Cyprus to the Holy Roman Emperor, thereby elevating the island lordship into a kingdom. This made him equal in status to the queen of Jerusalem.

There is every reason to believe that Isabella personally liked and respected Aimery. Yet she unquestionably chose him as her consort because he was well-suited to please her barons and secure their enthusiastic support. Aimery de Lusignan had already demonstrated his extraordinary capabilities. He had decades of experience fighting in the Holy Land and had already commanded Jerusalem’s armies as constable under Baldwin IV. More recently, he had turned a rebellious island into a secure and prosperous kingdom. Equally importantly, Aimery was an outstanding administrator. In addition to elevating his lordship to a kingdom, he had wisely adopted the Greek administrative apparatus left behind by the Byzantines. This worked like a well-oiled machine to generate revenues and reduce local tensions and resentment. With the Greek bureaucracy behind him, Aimery rapidly established peace with the natives while consciously encouraging more settlement from the disenfranchised Franks of Syria. Lastly, he was economically savvy and pursued a policy of economic diversification, which led almost immediately to burgeoning prosperity.

Isabella and Aimery married in December 1197 and were crowned jointly in Acre’s cathedral in January 1198. Afterwards, Aimery turned his many talents to the benefit of what remained of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He secured a six-year truce with al-Adil in the first year of his reign which he later renewed. He thereby created the peace needed to concentrate on the reconstruction of institutions, infrastructure and the economy. He also commissioned scholars to collect information and record as much as possible from as many sources as possible about the laws of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to re-establish a legal basis for society. Meanwhile, Isabella gave birth to Sibylla in October 1198, a second daughter Melisende in 1200 and, at long last, a son in 1201. The boy was named Aimery after his father.

Yet tragedy struck again in early 1205. On 2 February, little Aimery died in Acre of unknown causes. Less than two months later, on 1 April, King Aimery fell victim to food poisoning after eating fish that was apparently off. Isabella may have partaken of the same meal or developed another illness. At roughly 33 years of age, she died on 5 May 1205, leaving her eldest daughter, Maria de Montferrat, as her heir.

Isabella may not have put herself in the limelight as much as Queen Melisende, yet her judicious choices for consort in 1192 and again in 1197 assured that her kingdom survived as a political entity. She chose to remain in the background, but that is not synonymous with being powerless. She most certainly guided Champagne as he navigated in a unique and, to him, unfamiliar legal environment, and he was reportedly devoted and reluctant to be parted from her. While Aimery was more independent, there is no indication that he ever attempted to raise himself above his wife, as Fulk had done. They were crowned and reigned jointly only to die little more than a month apart.

The Bartered Brides

Maria de Montferrat

Isabella’s heir was Maria, her daughter by Conrad de Montferrat. She was at most 13 and more likely 12 when her stepfather and mother died in early 1205. She was also still a maiden, and the High Court immediately appointed a regent to rule for her until a suitable candidate for her husband and consort could be identified. The High Court’s choice fell on her closest adult relative, her mother’s half-brother, John d’Ibelin.

John was the son of the Dowager Queen Maria Comnena by her second husband, Balian d’Ibelin. He had been appointed constable of the kingdom by King Aimery in 1197. However, he exchanged this post for the lordship of Beirut sometime before 1200, although the exact date is unknown. Beirut was one of the few cities in the kingdom to defy Saladin in 1187, and it paid a terrible price in assault, slaughter and plunder. German crusaders had recaptured the city from a Saracen garrison in 1197, but the city and surrounding countryside were in such a ruinous state that even the military orders did not want to assume the cost of restoring it. John d’Ibelin, however, succeeded in making it a functioning port that was soon producing immense revenues. It was probably this, as well as his blood ties to the young queen, that encouraged the High Court to appoint him regent, although he was, at most, 27 years old at the time.

The Lord of Beirut maintained the truces with the Ayyubids and acted as a conscientious caretaker of his niece’s kingdom, while representatives from the High Court requested that the French king select a suitable nobleman to be their queen’s consort. By 1208, a candidate had been identified, namely John de Brienne. Brienne’s title derived from a subsidiary county inside the County of Champagne, and John was, technically, only the regent of Brienne for his deceased elder brother’s minor heir. As such, he was at best of secondary rank, and the French king’s choice of this relatively obscure nobleman bordered on an insult to the once proud Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Yet Jerusalem was proud no more. It was symbolically and emotionally significant. It still commanded material wealth. But it was vulnerable and short of manpower. Beggars, as the expression goes, cannot be choosers. Besides, John de Brienne was a young and vigorous man, roughly 31, with a glamorous reputation on the tourney circuit. Furthermore, his cousin Walter of Montbéliard was then regent of Cyprus for King Hugh I, who was a minor. (Montbéliard had married the eldest of Hugh’s sisters.) Very likely, Montbéliard put in a good word for Brienne.

Yet, while Brienne’s reputation at arms was high, he was not a powerful lord with a large entourage or an extensive feudal base. To make up for this deficit, King Philip of France and the pope granted him large sums of money to hire mercenaries. In 1210, after almost two years of recruiting, John de Brienne arrived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem with an entourage estimated at 300 knights and an unknown number of squires, sergeants and archers. Although significant, this was not a vast crusading army likely to tip the balance of power in the Near East in favour of the Christians. Therefore, from the start, John was something of a disappointment to his subjects in Outremer.

Whether he was also a disappointment to his bride, the now 18-year-old Maria de Montferrat, is unknown. There is no reason to assume so. Not only was he a successful tournament champion, but he also came from the heartland of chivalry and was a writer of poetry and song. The couple was crowned jointly in Tyre, with most of the High Court in attendance.

This latter fact tempted the Saracens into launching an attack on Acre. Although the attack was beaten off, it was an inauspicious start to John and Maria’s reign. Maria’s new husband retaliated with a chevauchée (cavalry raid) of his own. Yet, while this did some damage and the participants returned loaded with loot, they achieved no lasting benefit for the kingdom. John next attempted to strike at Egypt with a sea-borne expedition into the Nile Delta. Unfortunately, he did not have sufficient force to do more than moderate damage to secondary targets. The Ayyubids concluded that John de Brienne was no Richard the Lionheart and was unlikely to do them serious harm. They brazenly began the construction of fortifications on Mount Tabor. These commanding heights threatened Nazareth, which the Christians had only recovered in 1204.

Meanwhile, John’s small host of crusaders had fulfilled their vows and returned home to France. John had little choice but to conclude a new six-year truce with the Saracens without territorial gains – the first time a treaty without territorial gain had been concluded since the Third Crusade. There can be little doubt that many men in John’s new kingdom were less than impressed by his performance. However, all might have been forgiven had he at least done his dynastic duty and produced a male heir. Instead, in November of 1212, Queen Maria gave birth to a daughter and died shortly afterwards. She was too young and had ruled too short a time to leave any notable mark on the kingdom; we have no idea what kind of queen she might have been. She left behind an infant, a female heir, the worst possible scenario. It immediately produced a constitutional crisis.

Isabella II (Yolanda)

As king-consort, John’s right to the throne of Jerusalem was derived through his wife. Already in 1190–1192, the precedent had been set that the consort of a ruling queen did not retain his position after her death. Unsurprisingly, Brienne followed Guy de Lusignan’s precedent of refusing to accept his dismissal. Like Guy before him, Brienne insisted that he had been crowned and anointed for life, or at least until his infant daughter came of age and married.

Brienne’s daughter, known in history as Yolanda or Isabella II, made Brienne’s situation materially different from that of Guy de Lusignan. Guy’s daughters by Sibylla of Jerusalem had died before she did, leaving him no claim to a regency. Brienne, on the other hand, could reasonably argue that he was still ‘king’ of Jerusalem as long as his daughter was a minor. The argument won over most of the barons, with the notable exception of the former regent, the lord of Beirut and other members of the Ibelin clan.

Ibelin opposition to John de Brienne may have been based on principle. John d’Ibelin was famous for his understanding of the law. His legal opinion was highly respected and sought after in court cases. According to Philip de Novare, the famous legal scholar of the thirteenth century, Ibelin’s legal views were widely considered definitive. Furthermore, his parents had been Guy de Lusignan’s chief opponents when he claimed the crown after Queen Sibylla’s death. Yet, it was common practice for a minor’s closest relative, male or female, to serve as regent. In this case, the closest relative to the infant heiress, Yolanda, was her father. Beirut’s opposition was almost certainly more about self-interest than legal technicalities. When the rest of the High Court recognised Brienne as regent and continued to treat him as their king, the Ibelins withdrew to Cyprus. They expanded their power base and position of influence there without, of course, surrendering their mainland fiefs.

Meanwhile, Pope Innocent III was actively advocating a new crusade to regain Jerusalem by putting pressure on the sultan of Egypt. By now, the king of Sicily, king of the Germans and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, had come of age and dramatically taken the cross twice. There was a general expectation that he would lead this crusade and put the full financial and military might of the Holy Roman Empire behind it. However, Frederick II proved himself a reluctant crusader, easily distracted by other matters. He repeatedly postponed crusading for fifteen years. Instead, he sent others to fight for him, and the crusade, numbered by historians centuries later as the Fifth, was launched without him in 1217.

It was not until mid-1218 that enough men and troops arrived from the West for the crusade to begin in earnest. Chief among them, although not in command of any but his own contingent of vassals and their men, was the acting king of Jerusalem, John de Brienne. He was supported by virtually all the kingdom’s noblemen, except the Ibelins, who participated in the crusade under the banner of the Cypriot king. Surprisingly, Brienne succeeded in convincing his fellow crusaders from across Europe that any territorial gains made in Egypt would be ceded to the Kingdom of Jerusalem rather than individual leaders fighting in the crusade. As a result, when the crusaders captured the Egyptian city of Damietta after a siege lasting roughly a year and a half, Brienne was declared king in Damietta.

More importantly, the crusader capture of Damietta induced Egypt’s Sultan al-Kamil to offer to restore all the territory that had once been part of the Kingdom of Jerusalem – including Jerusalem and Bethlehem – to Christian control in exchange for the crusaders’ evacuation of Damietta. Brienne vigorously advocated for the acceptance of this offer. He was supported by the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, but overruled by the other crusading leaders, most notably the papal legate Pelagius and Frederick II’s deputy and representative, the Duke of Bavaria. This decision revealed all too clearly that the ‘king’ of Jerusalem was not taken particularly seriously by either the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor.

Furthermore, the Ayyubids, trying to ease the pressure of the crusade on the Nile, struck at the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In a devastating raid, Saracen forces destroyed the coastal city of Caesarea and were soon threatening the Templar’s new stronghold at Athlit. The Templars and many barons and knights from Outremer abandoned the crusade in Egypt to hasten back to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and repulse the threat.

To Brienne’s credit, he did not despair. Instead, he undertook renewed efforts to bring the necessary financial and military resources to his beleaguered kingdom that would enable it to beat back its enemies and re-establish viable borders. To do so, he played his ‘trump card’, namely his daughter’s undeniable status as heiress to the kingdom. Brienne sought to improve his deficits as a king-consort (i.e., a man without significant financial or military resources) by marrying his daughter to the most powerful Western nobleman imaginable: the Holy Roman Emperor himself. While the strategy appeared to make sense, it ultimately backfired with disastrous consequences for Brienne, his daughter Yolanda and the entire kingdom.

In the summer of 1225, envoys arrived in Acre with the news that Yolanda’s father had negotiated her marriage to the most powerful monarch on earth, a man already calling himself ‘the Wonder of the World’. A proxy marriage was staged in Acre followed by a coronation in Tyre. Immediately afterwards, Yolanda set sail with a large escort of prelates and noblemen for Apulia. She arrived at Brindisi and married Frederick II in person on November 9, 1225; it was just days before or after her thirteenth birthday. Her bridegroom was a 30-year-old widower who maintained a harem in the Sicilian tradition.

Furthermore, the marriage got off to a terrible start. Yolanda’s father had negotiated for the marriage with implicit or explicit assurances from the emperor that John would remain king of Jerusalem until his death. Frederick Hohenstaufen had other ideas. He declared himself king of Jerusalem the day after the wedding and made the barons who had escorted Yolanda to Italy swear fealty to him at once.

Yolanda’s father was outraged, and so was the Master of the Teutonic Knights, Herman von Salza, who had been instrumental in the marriage negotiations. The latter strongly suggests that Brienne had not simply been deluding himself about retaining the crown after his daughter’s marriage. Frederick instantly made an enemy of his father-in-law, and the breach ensured that Yolanda never saw her father again before she died. Perhaps she did not miss him, given how little she had seen of him during her short life, but she certainly found no comfort or companionship in her husband. Although it is hard to distinguish facts from slander, the tales of Yolanda’s marriage are unremittingly negative.

Meanwhile, Frederick was under increasing pressure to fulfil his repeated promises to go to the aid of the Holy Land. He had first taken crusading vows in 1215 and eleven years later had nothing but excuses to show for it. During the negotiations for his marriage to Yolanda, he had promised to set out on crusade no later than August 1227 or face excommunication. In the summer of 1227, a great army assembled in Apulia to sail to the defence of Christian Syria, but before the crusaders could embark, a contagious disease spread among them, killing thousands. Frederick boarded a vessel but was so ill his companions urged him to return. Frederick put about and landed not in the Holy Land but in the Kingdom of Sicily. The pope promptly excommunicated him.

Throughout this, Yolanda – technically, the reigning queen of Jerusalem – was imprisoned in Frederick’s harem. Her husband and consort had not thought to take her with him when he set out for her kingdom. On 25 April 1228, Yolanda gave birth to a son, christened Conrad. Ten days later, on 5 May 1228, Yolanda of Jerusalem died. She was not yet 16 years old. Although she had been a queen almost from the day of her birth, not once had she exercised the authority to which she had been born.

To add insult to death, her husband Frederick II hardly took any notice of this fact. He continued to claim her kingdom as his right, despite denying his father-in-law the same dignity. Because of his disregard for the laws and customs of Yolanda’s kingdom, Frederick soon found himself at loggerheads with Jerusalem’s barons. In the end, Yolanda’s subjects defeated her husband, but only decades after she had been sacrificed on the altar of her father and husband’s ambitions.

Jerusalem Again Without a Queen: The Absentee Kings 1228–1268

Yolanda’s infant son was exactly one-month old when his father finally embarked on his long-anticipated crusade. On 21 July 1228, Frederick II landed in Cyprus, where he made a crude attempt to disseize and extort money from the regent of Cyprus, John d’Ibelin – the same John d’Ibelin, Lord of Beirut, who had been regent of Jerusalem for Maria de Montferrat. Frederick’s bullying, which included surrounding unarmed knights and barons attending a banquet with mercenaries wielding naked swords, met with granite resistance. Beirut bluntly told the emperor that he could arrest or kill him, but he would not surrender his barony nor give an account of his regency unless there was a judgement by the respective High Court against him. He then turned and walked out of the emperor’s banquet with most of the Cypriot knights and nobles in his wake. The battle lines had been drawn.

For the next twenty-two years, Frederick tried to assert authoritarian control over the Kingdom of Jerusalem without regard for the kingdom’s constitution. The fundamental problem was that Frederick II viewed the Kingdom of Jerusalem as just one of his many possessions without recognising it as an independent kingdom with unique traditions, customs and laws. He believed he could dispose of it and rule it as he liked. Most egregiously, he acted as if the inhabitants held their lands and titles not by hereditary right or royal charter but simply at his personal whim. He thereby violated the fundamental principles of feudalism that recognised that even a serf could not be expelled from his land without due process and just cause. Equally offensively, he also rejected the feudal principle of ruling with the advice and consent of the barons of the realm.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, however, was a feudal state par excellance, frequently held up by scholars as the ‘ideal’ feudal kingdom. (See, for example, John La Monte’s work, Feudal Monarchy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100 to 1291, or John Riley Smith’s The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1174–1277.) The nobility of Outremer in the age of Frederick II had already developed highly sophisticated constitutional views. Based on the history of Jerusalem, they viewed their kings as no more than the ‘first among equals’. Furthermore, they upheld the concept of government as a contract between the king and his subjects, requiring the consent of the ruled in the form of the High Court.

Historians have rightly pointed out that, as the struggle between the Hohenstaufen and the barons dragged on, the baronial faction became ever more creative in inventing laws and customs designed to undermine Hohenstaufen rule. This overlooks the fact that the emperor had already squandered all credibility by repeatedly breaking his word and behaving like a despot. The baronial opposition became increasingly desperate and inventive in finding the means to prevent a proven tyrant from gaining control of the kingdom. They were creative in finding legal pretexts for achieving that aim. Yet that should not obscure the fact that at the core of the baronial opposition to Frederick stood the belief in rule-of-law as opposed to rule-by-imperial-whim.

Frederick proved his contempt for the laws and constitution of Jerusalem within the first four years of his reign by the following actions: (1) refusing to recognise that his title to Jerusalem was derived through his wife rather than a divine right; (2) demanding the surrender of Beirut and nearly a dozen other lordships without due process; and (3) ignoring the High Court of Jerusalem and its functions, which included approving treaties.

Of these actions, the second has received the most attention because Frederick’s attempt to disseize the Lord of Beirut without due process was the spark that ignited the civil war. Because the Lord of Beirut was a highly respected, powerful and learned nobleman, the emperor’s arrogant, arbitrary and unconstitutional attempt to disseize him met with widespread outrage and, finally, armed opposition. Beirut rallied a majority of the kingdom – and not just the nobility, but the Genoese, Templars and commons of Acre – to his cause. After each bitter defeat, Frederick tried to find a means of placating the opposition, yet he refused to budge on the principle of his right to arbitrarily disseize lords without due process. To the end, he insisted that Beirut abdicate his lordship without due process. To the end, Beirut insisted on due process before surrendering anything.

Unfortunately, because the clash between Beirut and the emperor is the focus of a lively, colourful and detailed contemporary account by the jurist and philosopher Philip de Novare, most historians (if they look at the conflict at all) reduce the baronial resistance to a struggle over land and titles. This dramatically oversimplifies the opposition’s concerns and overlooks the other two constitutional principles that Frederick II blatantly violated.

The issue of where he derived his right to rule in Jerusalem surfaced first. As noted above, the very day after his wedding to Queen Yolanda of Jerusalem, Frederick demanded the lords of Jerusalem do homage to him as king in direct violation of the marriage agreement he had negotiated with his father-in-law, King John. Yet after Yolanda’s death, Frederick abruptly – and without a trace of shame or embarrassment – adopted Brienne’s position that his rule continued despite his wife’s demise. He refused to recognise his son by Yolanda as king of Jerusalem and continued calling himself by that title until the day he died. On his deathbed in December 1250, Frederick II bequeathed Italy, Germany and Sicily to Yolanda’s son Conrad. Still, he suggested that Conrad give the Kingdom of Jerusalem to his half-brother Henry, the son of his third wife, Isabella of England. This proves that Frederick utterly failed to acknowledge or accept that the crown of Jerusalem was not his to give away. It had derived from his wife and could only pass to her heirs and only with the consent of the High Court. Frederick’s attempt to give Jerusalem away to someone with no right to it was a final insult to the bride he neglected and possibly abused. It also demonstrates that to his last breath, he remained ignorant of or indifferent to the constitution of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Last but not least, in the general enthusiasm for Frederick’s ‘bloodless crusade’ of 1228–1229, historians and novelists generally overlook the fact that the constitution of Jerusalem gave the High Court the right to make treaties. Frederick II Hohenstaufen blissfully ignored this constitutional right when he secretly negotiated with the Sultan al Kamil and presented the High Court of Jerusalem with a fait accompli. This, as much as the seriously flawed terms of the treaty, outraged the local nobility.

Admirers of Frederick II appear to believe that constitutional concerns should not be allowed to inhibit a ‘genius’ who could ‘retake’ Jerusalem without any loss of life. Yet they conveniently forget that the kings and regents of Jerusalem had been making treaties with the Saracens for more than a hundred years before Frederick arrived. There was nothing exceptional, much less revolutionary, about making treaties with the Saracens. Frederick II did nothing inherently different from what every king of Jerusalem had done for the previous 128 years. The fact that his treaty included nominal control of Jerusalem for ten years did not make it exceptionally brilliant. It was a treaty doomed to failure; Richard of England had been too intelligent to fall into a similar trap by taking control of a city he would not be able to hold in the long run. Because Frederick II’s truce (not a treaty, but a temporary truce) left Jerusalem naked of every kind of defence, it left the city so vulnerable that none of the military orders bothered to move their headquarters back to the Holy City. Indeed, Frederick II’s terms were so terrible they led directly to the slaughter of some 40,000 Christians soon after the treaty expired.

The entire era of Hohenstaufen rule, including the reigns of Frederick’s son and grandson, was characterised by absentee rule. In the quarter-century in which Frederick II called himself king of Jerusalem, he spent only eight months in the Holy Land. Neither his son nor grandson ever set foot in the kingdom for a single day. Thus, from November 1225 until 28 October 1268, Jerusalem was ruled by various, sometimes competing, baillies, i.e., deputy regents, sometimes appointed by the distant Hohenstaufens and sometimes elected by the local barons. Such men could never exert the authority of a king, not even a weak king like John de Brienne. More than anything, this doomed the Kingdom of Jerusalem to annihilation.

This was not immediately apparent, however. Through clever exploitation of the rivalries between the various Ayyubid princes, the Franks had by 1244 managed to restore the borders of the Kingdom of Jerusalem almost to what they had been in 1187 before the catastrophe at Hattin. Unfortunately, that year, the kingdom allied itself with the losing side in squabble between two Ayyubid princes. As a result, a large part of the kingdom’s army was wiped out at the Battle of La Forbie on 11 July 1244. Fortunately, the victors were not jihadists, and the kingdom was not immediately overrun. Nevertheless, it was once again vulnerable.

Soon other external factors began to undermine the kingdom’s viability. Starting in 1250, the Ayyubids, with their practical interest in trade and economic development, were one after another murdered and replaced by fanatical Mamluks, who preferred to cut off their own sources of revenues rather than maintain mutually beneficial ties with their Christian neighbours. Meanwhile, the Mongols swept in from the Far East and were intent on subjugating the entire world with a level of brutality unprecedented in Europe.

By the time Hohenstaufen rule ended in 1268, the kingdom was beginning to unravel. The Genoese were openly at war with the Venetians in the streets of Acre. The Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights were at each other’s throats. The Mamluks had captured Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf, then Galilee, and in 1268, Jaffa. In the north, Antioch was overwhelmed in 1268 and subjected to slaughter and plunder on a scale comparable to the Mongol capture of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus eight years earlier.

Nor did the death of the last titular Hohenstaufen king pave the way for a better era. On the contrary, both Hugh III of Cyprus and Marie of Antioch laid claim to Jerusalem and vied for support. Yet neither was present in the kingdom. Marie eventually sold her claim to Charles of Anjou, the unscrupulous younger brother of King Louis IX of France. It was not until the death of Anjou in 1286 that the various factions in the kingdom could agree to crown Henry II of Cyprus as their king. By then, the kingdom existed in name only. Only a few cities along the coastline remained. Some of these, like the always quasi-independent Tripoli and the isolated Beirut, concluded independent treaties with the Mamluks to buy themselves time.

In April 1289, Tripoli fell, and two years later, on 6 April 1291, the Mamluk siege of Acre began. The greatest and wealthiest city of Outremer, once the rival of Alexandria and Constantinople, fell on 18 May. Sidon surrendered in June, Beirut in July, and the Templars voluntarily abandoned their last castles in the Levant, Tartus and Athlit, on 3 August and 14 August, respectively. The original crusader states were no more. Only the latecomer, Cyprus, remained.