If the name of Sybil of Jerusalem is known to people at all today, it's thanks to the (highly fictionalized) version of her played by Eva Green in Ridley Scott's dubious 2005 historical epic Kingdom of Heaven. Here, Helen Nicholson tries to recover as much as we can about the life and career of the historic Sybil, a woman who for a brief time was the queen-regnant of Jerusalem.

There is, truthfully, very little we can say for certain. Sybil's reign was short, took place during a troubled period, and much of the documentation of it was destroyed along with the rest of the chancery holdings when the Crusader kingdom finally fell. This means that Nicholson has to try to provide a kind of photo-negative account of Sybil's life, tracing the actions and movements of those (mostly men) around her, and then trying to logically deduce where that meant Sybil probably was during such-and-such period. Nicholson is to be applauded for gathering together all the surviving crumbs about Sybil's short life—she was maybe 30 years old when she died—and for unpicking the legends which have grown up around Sybil over the centuries. Barring the highly unlikely discovery of some new cache of documentary evidence, Sybil of Jerusalem will probably be the go-to reference on this queen—but it's not particularly satisfying as a biography. ( )