ABSTRACT
Very little evidence survives of Sybil as an individual: for instance, we do not know exactly when she was born or the day of her death, the names of all her children or where she was buried. Yet we may trace the outlines of her life by piecing together information from a range of different sources: narrative, documentary and archaeological. A few events in her life were well recorded by contemporaries, which tell us how her contemporaries regarded her and allow some speculation about her motives. This chapter surveys her cultural and family background as the eldest daughter of a king of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and a Frankish noblewoman, both with Armenian grandmothers. It considers the visual and written evidence for Sybil as an individual and for her life and the challenges of interpretation these present. As queen, Sybil has been overshadowed by her second husband, Guy de Lusignan. Some scholars have argued that as a woman she could only wield power through a man, and she had to pass her authority to Guy because her kingdom needed a male leader to lead the army of the kingdom. Yet other Christian queens and noblewomen of the twelfth century had acted as military leaders and ruled in their own right, begging the question of why Sybil failed to do this.
