But the boy king died a year later, and the throne passed, with some controversy, to the boy's mother, Sibylla. He left the throne to his eight-year old nephew Baldwin V. In 1185, Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem, died aged 24. These orders, the two most powerful of which were the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, combined the traditional vows of monks with the emerging chivalric ideals of knights. The king of Jerusalem and his lords had to rely heavily on diplomacy to maintain their control, and when it came to blows a new phenomenon, the military orders, took on a large share of the burden. Appeals for reinforcements from the West provoked little response. The fractious European guardians of Jerusalem now faced a determined and unified opponent and the Crusader kingdoms began to fall. With Saladin, the situation in the east was reversed. Among these were Zengi, Nur ad-Din, and, finally, Saladin. Over the course of the next century, the Islamic empires of the Near East attained first equilibrium and finally cohesion thanks to a number of powerful, charismatic warlords. The first crusaders had launched their pilgrimage (their word: the word Crusade was not applied until much later) at a time when the Seljuq Empire was subdivided among numerous rival lords, and the Seljuqs themselves warred off and on with the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. The disorganized, underfed, disease-ridden knights' miraculous success, it became clear, had been aided by division within the Islamic world.
Following the fall of Jerusalem to the knights of the First Crusade in 1099, the kingdoms and counties founded to safeguard Christian holy sites in the Near East faced ongoing problems.
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