Queen of Jerusalem (1205–1212), daughter of Conrad of Montferrat and Isabella I, who ruled through regents and her husband John of Brienne until she died in childbirth.
Maria of Montferrat was queen regnant of Jerusalem from 1205 to 1212. The daughter of Conrad of Montferrat and Queen Isabella I, she inherited the crusader crown as a girl of thirteen when her mother and stepfather, Amalric II, both died in 1205.
Known as "Marie la Marquise" for her father's marquisate, she ruled first through regents drawn from the Ibelin family and then, from 1210, through her husband John of Brienne, who was brought from France to be king by right of his wife. She died in 1212 giving birth to her daughter Isabella II, through whom the crown would pass, by a later marriage, to the Emperor Frederick II.
Maria was born in 1192, the daughter of Conrad of Montferrat — briefly king-elect of Jerusalem before his assassination that same year — and Isabella I, the heiress through whom the crusader crown descended. She grew up at the court of her mother and her mother's later husbands, in the reduced kingdom that now clustered around Acre after the loss of Jerusalem itself to Saladin.
When Isabella I and her fourth husband, King Amalric II, both died in 1205, the thirteen-year-old Maria became queen. As the senior heiress of the royal line, she carried the legitimacy of the whole kingdom in her person.
Maria's brief life left little record of her own personality; like several of the heiress-queens of Jerusalem, she is glimpsed mainly through the men who ruled in her name. The chroniclers present a young queen of unquestioned legitimacy but limited independent power, around whom the great baronial families — above all the Ibelins — and then a foreign husband-king organised the government.
What her career illustrates is the peculiar position of the queens regnant of Outremer: the crown descended strictly through the female line, so a woman's hand carried a kingdom, yet real authority was exercised by regents and consorts. Maria appears as a dutiful bearer of that inheritance, whose personal fate — early marriage, early death in childbirth — was bound entirely to the dynastic needs of a beleaguered kingdom.
For the first years of her reign Maria was a minor, and the kingdom was governed by regents, chiefly John of Ibelin, lord of Beirut. The barons then sought a suitable husband who could lead the kingdom in war, and with the advice of Philip II of France they chose John of Brienne, an experienced French knight, who came east and married Maria in 1210, becoming king by right of his wife.
Maria's own reign was thus exercised jointly with, and largely through, John of Brienne. Her role was to transmit the legitimate royal line: the marriage produced a daughter, Isabella II (also called Yolande), who would be the next heiress of Jerusalem.
Maria died in 1212, still only about twenty, from complications of giving birth to her daughter Isabella II. Her husband John of Brienne continued to rule as king, now as regent for their infant daughter, the new heiress of the kingdom.
Maria of Montferrat is remembered as a link in the fragile chain of heiress-queens through whom the crown of Jerusalem descended after the city itself was lost. Her marriage brought John of Brienne to the throne, and her daughter Isabella II carried the royal claim onward — marrying the Emperor Frederick II and so drawing the crusader kingdom into the orbit of the Hohenstaufen empire. Maria's short life sits at the point where the old royal line of Jerusalem passed toward its imperial future.