King Amalric, who died in 1174, had by his first wife a son, Baldwin, and a daughter, Sibyl; and by his second wife an infant daughter, Isabel. The first marriage had been dissolved on the ground of consanguinity; in strict law, therefore, Baldwin and Sibyl were illegitimate; Baldwin, however, became king without opposition, because he was the only male survivor of the royal house. But he was not yet fourteen, and he was a leper. In 1176, therefore, an attempt was made to provide for the succession by marrying his elder sister to a member of a distinguished family of Italian Crusaders, William of Montferrat. Within a year Sibyl was a widow; but she was also the mother of a son, and in 1183 this child was solemnly crowned and anointed king in his uncle’s lifetime. This precaution staved off the impending crisis for nearly three years, though the imminent prospect of a long royal minority in the existing political and military circumstances of Palestine was felt to be so alarming that the very Patriarch who had crowned the child became, only a few months later, eager to undo his own work and tried, but without success, to bring from Europe to the dying king and the distracted realm an adoptive male heir of full age in the person of one of the descendants of the first marriage of the Angevin Count Fulk V, whose second marriage had brought the crown of Jerusalem into the house of Anjou. Baldwin IV died before Heraclius returned from Europe, in the winter of 1184-5; in September 1186 little Baldwin V died also. Sibyl then claimed the crown in her own right, as the natural heiress at once of her child, her brother, and her father; the Templars, the Patriarch, and some of the nobles rallied round her at Jerusalem; the people acclaimed her as queen, and she was crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre together with her second husband, Guy of Lusignan. Sibyl’s half-sister, Isabel, was now fifteen years old, and had been married three years. A party among the nobles had ever since King Amalric’s death been biding their time to bring Isabel forward as his only legitimate representative and heir. They tried to do so now; they failed, however, because her young husband, Humphry of Toron, and his step-father and guardian, Reginald of Châtillon, both adhered to Sibyl. But when the sickness which raged in the Christian camp before Acre in 1190 carried off first the two little daughters of Sibyl and Guy and then Sibyl herself, Isabel and her partisans found their opportunity. On the pretext that Isabel had been wedded to Humphry without her consent, the Patriarch declared her [Sidenote: _Nov. 24_ 1190] marriage void. Immediately afterwards she married the man who had long been Guy’s most implacable rival, Conrad of Montferrat, a younger brother of Sibyl’s first husband.