So ended in utter failure and shame the Second Crusade. The event seemed to give the lie to the glowing promises of St. Bernard, who was charged by anguished women with sending their fathers, husbands, and sons forth on a fruitless errand to disgrace and death. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem profited nothing from this ignominious enterprise. The power of that kingdom was already waning, and, but for the knights of the military orders now in Jerusalem, the city must have yielded to the Turcoman hordes that continually menaced it. Baldwin III died in 1162, at the age of thirty-three, loved and lamented by his people and respected by his foes. He died childless, and his brother Almeric was elected to succeed him. What experience and what fate awaited the kingdom after this will be seen in the remarkable narration which follows. Almost at the beginning of Almeric's reign the affairs of the Latin kingdom became complicated with those of Egypt; and the Christians are seen fighting by the side of one Mahometan race, tribe, or faction against another. The divisions of Islam may have turned less on points of theology, but they were scarcely less bitter than those of Christendom; and Noureddin, the sultan of Aleppo, eagerly embraced the opportunity which gave him a hold on the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt, when Shawer, the grand _wazir_ of that Caliph, came into his presence as a fugitive. A soldier named Dargham had risen up and deposed him, and the deposition of the wazir was the deposition of the real ruler, for the Fatimite caliphs themselves were now merely the puppets which the Merovingian kings had been in the days of Charles Martel and Pépin.