Maria of Antioch (c. 1220 – after 10 December 1307) was a claimant to the throne of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1268 to 1277. In 1267, she submitted her claim to rule the kingdom as regent in the name of the absentee King Conrad III, her first cousin twice removed, to the High Court. Her legal case was solid, resting on the proximity of blood to the king, but the court found in favor of her nephew King Hugh III of Cyprus after she abruptly left the proceedings. When Conrad died in 1268, she demanded to be crowned as his successor and disrupted Hugh's coronation. Spurned yet again, she moved to Europe and in 1277 sold her claim to King Charles I of Sicily. Charles and his successor, Charles II, paid a pension to her and provided for her upkeep in southern Italy. Later in life, she laid claim to the defunct County of Tripoli.
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Family
Maria was born around 1220. She was the daughter of Bohemond IV, prince of Antioch and count of Tripoli, and his second wife, Melisende of Cyprus. Maria had four paternal half-brothers, including Bohemond V and Henry. Her mother, Melisende, was the youngest daughter of Queen Isabella I of Jerusalem and King Aimery of Cyprus. The Kingdom of Jerusalem passed to Melisende's eldest half-sister, Maria of Montferrat, and her descendants, but was by then a rump state reduced to Acre and a narrow coastal strip without Jerusalem itself. Another of Melisende's half-sisters, Alice of Champagne, ruled the kingdom as regent in the name of the minor and absent King Conrad II—grandson of Maria of Montferrat—until her death in 1246. At that point, Melisende put forward a claim to the regency as Conrad's closest living relative, but the High Court of Jerusalem rejected her in favor of King Henry I of Cyprus, Alice's son. Henry was likely more desirable because he was a man and already a crowned ruler, and he apparently granted land to the members of the High Court to sway them. Maria's half-brother Henry married King Henry's sister Isabella, and they had a son, Hugh. Maria never married and had no children.