Both Isabella and Aimery died in 1205 and again an underage girl, Isabella and Conrad's daughter Maria of Montferrat, became queen of Jerusalem. When Patriarch Amalric died on 6 October 1180, the two most obvious choices for his successor were William of Tyre and Heraclius of Caesarea.

As a leper, Baldwin had no children and could not be expected to rule much longer, so the focus of his succession passed to his sister Sibylla and his younger half-sister Isabella. The Latin Patriarch intervened to settle the dispute, but an assassination attempt was then made on Hugh, for which Fulk was blamed.

The crusaders may have been aware of the new divisions among the Ayyubids; al-Kamil had occupied Damascus in 1238 but had died soon afterwards, and his territory was inherited by his family. Of course we believe in the right of individuals to express themselves and to do so peacefully,” he said.

There have been fears in the lead-up to the event that they could lead wider violence, with the situation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza already tense, following more than a year of almost-daily Israeli raids that have killed hundreds of Palestinians, and a four-day conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza that left at least 33 Palestinians and one Israeli dead. Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 and the Battle of Jaffa in 1192, recovering most of the coast, but could not recover Jerusalem or any of the inland territory of the kingdom. Frederick immediately came into conflict with the native nobles of Outremer, some of whom resented his attempts to impose Imperial authority over both Cyprus and Jerusalem. At first the kingdom was little more than a loose collection of towns and cities captured during the First Crusade, but at its height in the mid-12th century, the kingdom encompassed roughly the territory of modern-day Israel, Palestine and the southern parts of Lebanon.The kingdom had a truce with Saladin at the time, and Raynald's actions have been seen as an independent act of brigandage; it is possible that he was trying to prevent Saladin from moving his forces north to take control of Aleppo, which would have strengthened Saladin's position. As the kingdom was by now a relatively unimportant state, the Mongols paid little attention to it, but there were a few skirmishes in 1260: the forces of Julian of Sidon killed the nephew of Kitbuqa, who responded by sacking Sidon, and John II of Beirut was also captured by the Mongols during another raid. For the next seven centuries, up to today, a veritable multitude of European monarchs have used the title of King of Jerusalem. That year, Manuel sent a large Byzantine fleet of some 300 ships to assist Amalric, and the town of Damietta was placed under siege. Superimposed over them is an upright black-outlined white bayonet blade, partially enclosed on its right by an olive branch, also in black-outlined white.