Isabella I

Also known as queen of four husbands

Younger half-sister of Sibylla and only surviving child of Amalric I by his second wife Maria Komnene, Isabella was married at eleven to the politically insignificant Humphrey IV of Toron. On Sibylla's death in 1190 she became the sole legitimate heir of the Kingdom of Jerusalem — but the barons (and her determined mother) decided that Humphrey was not the king they needed. In November 1190 they annulled the marriage over her tearful protests so she could be given to Conrad of Montferrat instead. She was seventeen.

Her reign is a chronicle of four husbands and four funerals. Conrad was assassinated in April 1192, a week before his coronation. She was married at once to Henry II of Champagne, who refused the royal title but governed capably as “Lord of the Kingdom of Jerusalem” for five years until he fell from a palace window in Acre in 1197. Her fourth husband, Aimery of Lusignan — brother of Guy — briefly united the mainland kingdom with Cyprus and codified its laws in the Livre au Roi before dying of dysentery in 1205. Isabella followed him a few months later.

Contemporaries thought her beautiful and gentle. Modern historians often call her a pawn of her barons; others have argued more kindly that her willingness to accept each dynastic marriage was itself a form of statecraft, the only way to preserve the legal continuity of the kingdom through the wreckage of the Third Crusade. Her reign is remembered as the Age of Reconstruction — the decade when the capital was rebuilt at Acre and the kingdom, now a coastal strip, became a working Mediterranean power once more.

Preceded by Sibylla. Succeeded by Maria of Montferrat.

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