ON AUGUST 21, 1131, Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem and veteran of the First Crusade, died in Jerusalem. His crown passed jointly to his eldest daughter Melisende, her husband Fulk (formerly the count of Anjou), and their infant son, Baldwin III. This was a highly unusual direction for royal succession to take, as traditionally a male relative (son, brother, nephew) was chosen as heir apparent, bypassing the female line completely. But Baldwin II, who had four daughters but no sons, had chosen this route and planned for the day when his crown would be passed to his successor. Upon his election to the throne in 1118 Baldwin II had been unwilling to set aside his wife, Morphia, in the hope of fathering a son with a second bride for the purpose of providing Jerusalem with a male heir. Instead, he pursued a different course of action, and sought the counsel of both the papacy and prominent Frankish kings to choose a suitable husband for his eldest daughter, one who would jointly rule the kingdom with her after his death. With the Latin kingdom barely thirty years old and precariously balanced between the Byzantine Empire and factions of Islam, dynastic continuity was perceived to be essential, and in 1131 Melisende became its first designated female heir and regnant queen.

Melisende was not the only woman to inherit the throne of Jerusalem. Between 1186 and 1228 the lack of a healthy male heir made daughters crucially important to the succession, as a direct female heir was preferred to a distant male relative. Four queens ruled Jerusalem consecutively during this period: Sibylla (1186– 1190), Isabella I (1192– 1205), Maria (1205– 1212), and Isabella II (1212– 1228). Female rule was highly unusual in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and for some dynasties, particularly Capetian France, which had a direct line of male succession between 987 and 1328, there was no need for a female heir. However, other royal houses were not so fortunate, and England, in particular, endured nearly twenty years of civil war when Henry I died in 1135 without a male heir, leaving the country divided between support for his daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen of Blois.