Kingdom of Jerusalem

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also called the Crusader Kingdom, was one of the Crusader states founded in the Levant right after the First Crusade. It began with the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 and lasted almost two hundred years, until the fall of Acre in 1291. Its history falls into two periods separated by a short gap: the first kingdom ended in 1187 when the Ayyubid Sultanate under Saladin overran almost all of it after the siege of Jerusalem, and a second kingdom was re-established at Acre in 1192 after the Third Crusade, which is why it is often called the Kingdom of Acre. Most settlers, knights and soldiers came from the Kingdom of France, so its rulers and elite were largely French, and over time it came to depend increasingly on the Italian maritime republics of Venice and Genoa.