In March 1148 Louis VII. and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, landed at Antioch with the little band of knights, that now alone represented the two greatest military powers of Christendom. He hurried at once to the south, where he was joined by Conrad III., who had now reached Acre by sea. It was unwisely resolved to march against Damascus, though its ruler was the chief enemy of Noureddin, Zangi’s son and successor, and would have willingly stood aside had the attack been concentrated on the conquerors of Edessa. As it was, Mosul and Damascus made common cause, and the attack on the latter city proved an utter failure. Conrad at once went home, and Louis followed him a year later. The result of the Second Crusade was to promote the unity of Islam, and to divert the enemy from the north to Jerusalem, where the Christian position was weakest.
The thirty years succeeding the Second Crusade were a period of fair but somewhat stationary prosperity for the Latin East. The long minority of Baldwin III. (1143–1163) was a great calamity in itself, but his mother, Millicent, was a capable regent, and Baldwin, when he grew up, proved a vigorous warrior both against the Egyptians and Noureddin, while his affability, generosity, and bright ready wit made him the most popular of all his line. By his marriage with Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Manuel, Baldwin III. did something to promote active co-operation between the Greeks and the Latins against Islam, and his death in 1163 was a great loss to the Latin kingdom. [Sidenote: The Kingdom of Jerusalem between the Second and the Third Crusades.] Amalric I., his brother (1163–1174), also married a Byzantine wife, and even visited Constantinople. But with all his policy he failed to unite effectively the Christian forces, or to check seriously the growth of the power of Noureddin, and with his death the decline of the kingdom rapidly set in. His son and successor, Baldwin IV. (1174–1185), began to reign as a boy of twelve, and as he grew up proved a hopeless leper. On his death another child, Baldwin V. (1185–1186), his sister Sibyl’s son by her first husband, succeeded, but he died the next year. The crown was now disputed between Guy of Lusignan, Sibyl’s second husband, and Raymond, Count of Tripoli, who had acted as regent for the leper king. In the short but sharp civil war that followed, the last hopes of the kingdom perished.