7 - ‘La roine preude femme et bonne dame’: Queen Sybil of Jerusalem (1186–1190) in History and Legend, 1186–1300

Summary

Queen Sybil (or Sibyl or Sibylla) of Jerusalem, queen in her own right, married a man who was thoroughly hated by some of her most powerful and influential nobles, lost her kingdom to the Muslim ruler Saladin, and died in a siege camp with her children, leaving her husband without a claim to the throne. In terms of rulership, her reign was a disaster. However, the thirteenth-century description of her quoted above in the title to this article makes no allusion to these military failures. Sybil was a noble woman or wife (as femme can mean either) and a good woman in authority. It is the dichotomy between the events of Sybil's reign and this reputation assigned to her over half a century after her death that is the subject of this article.

The life of Sybil of Jerusalem has been routinely surveyed by historians of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century, but there have been no studies devoted specifically to Sybil, although her career has received detailed analysis in works by Sarah Lambert (1997) and Bernard Hamilton (2000). Both Hamilton and Lambert analyzed how contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers depicted Sybil's career. Lambert asked whether these writers considered a woman suitable to govern the realm, and concluded that although the idea of queenship in the Latin East was progressively diminished during the period 1118–1228, there was ‘a lack of any real consensus about the way in which a reigning queen should be treated in political history and an inability fully to resolve the tensions between dynasty, gender and the demands of politics.’ As the existence of hereditary queenship became fixed in law, queens could not be excluded from the throne, but instead were excluded from political activity. Hamilton traced distortions in contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of Sybil to the political conflicts within the realm and carefully reconstructed the actual course of events. This article will not seek to duplicate this work by attempting to trace the ‘truth’ of Sybil's life, but will move on from their analysis of contemporary sources to ask what contemporaries considered important about her and why; and then consider how and why these literary-historical depictions of Sybil developed during the century after her death. In successive rewritings of Sybil's story, the historical figure disappeared and was replaced by a stereotypical figure which bore little resemblance to actuality.