This conquest was the most important event that signalized the latter years of the reign of Foulque of Anjou. The king of Jerusalem, whilst hunting in the plain of Ptolemaïs, fell from his horse, and died of the fall, leaving no one to succeed him but two children of tender age. He was less regretted on account of his personal qualities than for the sad condition in which his death left the kingdom. William of Tyre, who praises the virtues of Foulque of Anjou, remarks, with a _naïveté_ worthy of these remote times, that this prince had red hair, and yet he could not be reproached with any of the faults usually attributed to men of that colour. He was more than sixty years of age when he ascended the throne of Jerusalem; in the last years of his life his memory was so weakened that he did not know his own servants, and had not sufficient strength and activity to be the head of a kingdom surrounded by enemies. He employed himself more in building fortresses than in collecting armies, and in defending his frontiers than in making new conquests. Under his reign the military ardour of the Christians seemed to grow weaker, and was displaced by a spirit of discord, which brought about calamities much greater than those of war. At the period of the coronation of Foulque of Anjou, the Christian states were at the highest degree of their prosperity; towards the end of his reign they showed a tendency to decline. Baldwin III., thirteen years of age, succeeded his father, and Queen Melisende became regent of the kingdom. Thus the reins of government fell from the weak and powerless hands of an old man into those of a woman and a child. Parties soon sprung up around the throne; the clergy, the knights, the barons, even the people took a dangerous part in affairs of state, and the authority of the prince, which hitherto had been but that of the general of an army, lost under the regency of Queen Melisende the consideration and splendour it had derived from victory. The government insensibly assumed the turbulent form of a republic, and in the political relations which the Christians held at this period with the Saracens,[257] the latter believed that several chiefs were at the head of the kingdom of Jerusalem.