The queens, Balian, Isabella, and Humphrey accompanied him, and the Third Crusade ensued. Unity appeared to have been restored during the crusade until Sibylla and her daughters died of an epidemic in mid-1190. Isabella was Sibylla's heir, but Guy attempted to retain the throne. The unpopularity of her husband, Humphrey, weakened Isabella's chances of supplanting Guy. Humphrey had alienated Guy's opponents by refusing to oppose him in 1186, while Maria had not forgiven him for his role in separating her from Isabella. Maria immediately allied with Conrad of Montferrat, the leader of the defence of Tyre, who desired the kingship. With her party, which included Balian, Reynald of Sidon, and Pagan II of Haifa, she abducted her daughter from her tent next to Humphrey's. Isabella was happy with Humphrey, and Maria had to browbeat her into agreeing to have their marriage annulled, arguing that her succession rights could not otherwise be enforced. Maria then stated before the papal legate, Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi of Pisa, and the bishop of Beauvais, Philip of Dreux, that Isabella had been forced by Baldwin IV to marry Humphrey and that she was underage at the time. Isabella was subsequently crowned and married to Conrad. Last years The Third Crusade brought the reconquest of a strip of coast from Jaffa to Tyre in 1192, but the kingdom remained without Jerusalem itself. Balian died in 1194 and Maria did not remarry again. She retained an active role in family affairs. Isabella I married twice more and died in 1205. Maria's native Byzantine state, which had ceased to be a great power in the 1180s, was all but destroyed in the Fourth Crusade, while the Kingdom of Jerusalem was reduced to a rump state centred in Acre; yet, Maria's influence only increased. In 1208 Maria arranged the marriage of Isabella I's daughter Alice of Champagne to King Hugh I of Cyprus. Having outlived all the principal figures of Christian-ruled Jerusalem, Maria may have provided valuable recollections of the kingdom's laws and customs to her son John. She died in mid-1217, in the reign of her great-granddaughter Isabella II. All the kings of Jerusalem and Cyprus and much of the 13th-century nobility of both Cyprus and the mainland kingdom descended from her. Character A very hostile source, the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, describes Maria as being "steeped in Greek filth from the cradle", and says that the character of her