Having arrived in the Holy Land (where his brother Aimery was already prominent) at an unknown date, Guy was hastily married to Sibylla in 1180 to prevent a political incident within the kingdom.

The siege, during which Guy's wife died, developed into a rallying point for the Third Crusade, led by Philip II of France and Richard I of England.

Nevertheless, Guy was compensated for the dispossession of his crown by being given lordship of Cyprus in 1192, which Richard had taken from the Byzantine Empire en route to the Levant.

[4] In 1168, Guy and his brothers, in an attempt to capture Eleanor of Aquitaine, ambushed and killed Patrick, 1st Earl of Salisbury, governor of Poitou, who was returning from a pilgrimage to Santiago of Compostela.

They captured Patrick's nephew William the Marshal, then a knight-errant serving in his uncle's household, and allowed him to be ransomed by Eleanor, but were banished from Poitou by their overlord, Richard I, Duke of Aquitaine.

Amalric had also obtained the patronage of King Baldwin IV and of his mother Agnes of Courtenay who held the County of Jaffa and Ascalon and was married to Reginald of Sidon.

It is likely that his promotions were aimed at weaning him away from the political orbit of the Ibelin family, who were associated with Raymond III of Tripoli, Amalric I's cousin and the former bailli or regent.

Raymond of Tripoli and his ally Bohemond III of Antioch were preparing to invade the kingdom to force the king to give his older sister Sibylla in marriage to Baldwin of Ibelin, Amalric's father-in-law.

Raynald of Châtillon gained widespread support for Sibylla by affirming that she was "li plus apareissanz et plus dreis heis dou rouame" ("the most evident and rightful heir of the kingdom").

However, before she was crowned, she agreed with oppositional court members that she would annul her marriage with Guy to please them, as long as she was given free choice in her next husband.

Sibylla's half-sister Isabella and her husband Humphrey IV of Toron were Raymond III and the Ibelins' choice for the throne.

Stationary, it was surrounded and cut off from a supply of water, and on 4 July, the army of Jerusalem was utterly destroyed at the Battle of Hattin.

According to the surviving members of the Haute Cour, Guy lost the authority he held as her husband with Sibylla's death, and the crown passed to Isabella.

In 1191, Guy left Acre with a small fleet and landed at Limassol to seek support from Richard I of England, whose vassal he had been in Poitou.

The conflict continued throughout the siege of Acre, although it did not deter Guy from gallantly saving Conrad's life when the enemy surrounded him.

Meanwhile, Guy was compensated for the loss of his kingdom by purchasing Cyprus from the Templars in 1192, who had themselves bought it from Richard, who had wrested it from Isaac Comnenus en route to Palestine.

Technically, Guy was Lord of Cyprus, not yet a kingdom, and used the royal title (if at all) as a remnant from Jerusalem, which was not held fully legally.

Guy appears as the main leading character in a tale of Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio,[9] where the censure of a Gascon lady rouses the King of Cyprus from lethargy to take responsibility for his realm.

Their harmony was uninterrupted until the prying husband broke the conditions of their union, by concealing himself to behold his wife make use of her enchanted bath.

Hardly had Melusina discovered the indiscreet intruder, than, transforming herself into a dragon, she departed with a loud yell of lamentation, and was never again visible to mortal eyes; although, even in the days of Brantome, she was supposed to be the protectress of her descendants, and was heard wailing as she sailed upon the blast round the turrets of the castle of Lusignan the night before it was demolished.Guy has also appeared in several historical novels, such as in the Crusades trilogy by the Swedish author Jan Guillou which depicts him as a scheming, incompetent and selfish as well as religiously fanatical villain accelerating the loss of the Holy Land to Saladin; in The Sir Balian d'Ibelin Trilogy by Helena P. Schrader; in Templar Silks by Elizabeth Chadwick, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's Król trędowaty ("The Leper King"), Graham Shelby's The Knights of Dark Renown, Cecelia Holland's Jerusalem, Knight Crusader by Ronald Welch, The Heart of the Lion by Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert) and also Sharon Kay Penman's The Land Beyond The Sea.

Guy is portrayed as a peace-loving elderly man, goaded into war by Raynald of Châtillon, in Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's 1963 film Saladin the Victorious.