Amaury, King of Jerusalem, died, leaving his useless sceptre in the hands of his wife, Isabella, whose demise passed it on to her daughter, Mary, by her former husband, Conrad of Tyre. Such were the burdens of the unsupported throne that none of the warriors in the East ventured to assume the responsibility of the new queen’s hand. A husband was sought for her in Europe. John of Brienne was nominated by Philip of France for the hazardous nuptials. John had been a monk, but his adventurous and martial spirit soon tired of the cowl. He abandoned the austerities of a professional saint for the freedom of the camp and the dangers of the field. The romantic perils of wedding the dowerless queen attracted him. Rumors of a new crusade of gigantic proportions led Malek-Ahdel to propose a renewal of the truce with the Christians, which, though continually broken, was in his estimation safer than an openly declared war. The Hospitallers approved peace. This was sufficient to make their rivals, the Templars, eager for the reverse, and the majority of the knights and barons flew to arms against one another. John of Brienne reached Acre with a meagre following of three hundred knights. His nuptials with the young Queen Mary were rudely disturbed by the Moslems, who besieged Ptolemaïs and swarmed in threatening masses around Acre. In their straits the Christians again appealed to Europe; but Christendom was fully occupied with contentions within its own borders. France was at war with England to repossess the fair provinces which the Angevine kings had wrested from her along the Atlantic. At the same time she was pressing her conquests beyond the Rhine against the Germans. Germany was divided by the rival claimants for the imperial sceptre, Otho and Philip of Swabia. A more serious diversion of interest from the affairs of Palestine was due to the crusade under Simon de Montfort against the Albigenses, whose record makes one of the blackest pages of human history. (See Dr. Vincent’s volume in this series.) The Saracens in Spain were also threatening to overturn the Christian kingdom of Castile, and were defeated only with tremendous effort, which culminated in the great battle of Tolosa (1212).