Baldwin IV of Jerusalem

Baldwin was born in 1161 in Jerusalem, the only son of King Amalric and his first wife, Agnes of Courtenay ^[1]. His parents' marriage was annulled shortly before Amalric took the throne in 1163 on grounds of consanguinity, though the church ruling explicitly preserved the legitimacy of Baldwin and his elder sister Sibylla. The boy remained at his father's court while Agnes went on to other marriages, and mother and son had little contact during his childhood ^[2].

His education was entrusted to William, archdeacon of Tyre, the scholar who later became chancellor of the kingdom and its greatest historian. William left the only eyewitness account of the discovery of Baldwin's illness. Watching the prince play with other boys around the age of nine, he noticed that Baldwin felt no pain when his companions pinched his right arm during their games. William at first attributed it to boyish toughness, then realized the arm was numb ^[1]. Physicians were consulted and treatments attempted, but the numbness spread, and in time the diagnosis became unmistakable: the prince had leprosy, the disease medieval writers regarded with particular dread ^[3].

Despite the illness, Amalric continued to treat Baldwin as his heir. The boy learned to ride superbly, controlling his horse with his knees as his right hand weakened, and contemporaries described him as intelligent, quick in memory, and strikingly like his father in bearing ^[1]. No effort was made to shut him away, a decision that shaped everything that followed.

Amalric died of dysentery in July 1174, returning from a campaign, and the thirteen-year-old Baldwin was crowned king of Jerusalem four days later in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ^[2]. His accession came at a dangerous moment. That same year Saladin took power in Damascus, beginning the unification of Egypt and Muslim Syria that would encircle the crusader states. The kingdom that the young leper king inherited faced, for the first time, the prospect of a single enemy on every land frontier ^[4].

Because Baldwin was a minor, the High Court appointed a regent. After a brief and unpopular interval under the seneschal Miles of Plancy, who was murdered in Acre in the autumn of 1174, the regency passed to Raymond III, count of Tripoli, the king's closest male kinsman in the East ^[2]. Raymond governed until Baldwin came of age in 1176 at fifteen, the legal majority for kings of Jerusalem.

Anyone asking who was Baldwin IV of Jerusalem confronts the central paradox of his position at once. Leprosy made him incapable of fathering an heir and guaranteed a short life, yet the barons crowned him anyway and he refused to be a figurehead. From 1176 he ruled in his own name, led his army in the field, and conducted diplomacy in person, even as the court began the long, poisonous argument over who would succeed him ^[3].

The defining moment of the reign came in November 1177. Saladin invaded the kingdom from Egypt with a large army while most of the crusader field forces were absent on campaign in the north with Philip of Flanders. Baldwin, sixteen years old, gathered a small force at Ascalon, where Saladin briefly penned him in before moving on toward Jerusalem, allowing his troops to scatter and plunder ^[4].

Baldwin broke out of Ascalon, joined by the Templars from Gaza and a hastily raised feudal levy, and caught Saladin's dispersed army near the hill of Montgisard, close to Ramla, on 25 November 1177. The charge of the Frankish knights shattered the Egyptian force. Saladin escaped on a racing camel and straggled back to Egypt with the remnant of his army, having suffered one of the worst defeats of his career ^[4]. Frankish sources credited the king, who rode in the charge despite his disease, and the victory was celebrated across Latin Christendom; Baldwin himself attributed it to the relic of the True Cross carried before the army ^[1].

Montgisard bought time rather than safety. Baldwin built a castle at Jacob's Ford on the upper Jordan in 1178 to guard the road to Damascus, but Saladin besieged and destroyed it in August 1179 after defeating the Franks at Marj Ayyun, a battle in which the king, unhorsed and unable to remount without help, had to be carried from the field on the back of a knight ^[5]. A truce followed in 1180. When the lord of Kerak, Reynald of Châtillon, broke it by raiding caravans, war resumed, and in 1182 and 1183 Baldwin repeatedly maneuvered Saladin away from invasions of Galilee without risking another pitched battle, a cautious defensive strategy that kept the kingdom intact ^[4].

Any account of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem facts must reckon with the progress of his disease. What began as numbness in one arm developed during his teens into lepromatous leprosy, the severest form. By his early twenties he had lost his sight, his face was disfigured, and his hands and feet were so damaged that he could no longer walk or ride; in his final campaigns he was carried in a litter at the head of the army ^[3]. Modern clinical study of the sources, notably by the physician and historian Piers Mitchell, confirms that William of Tyre's description matches the recognized course of the illness with unusual precision ^[3].

Since Baldwin could never marry, the succession ran through his sisters, and the politics of the reign revolved around their marriages. Sibylla was wed first to William of Montferrat, who died in 1177 leaving her pregnant with the future Baldwin V, and then in 1180 to Guy of Lusignan, a newcomer from Poitou. The court split into rival networks, one gathered around the king's mother Agnes of Courtenay, her brother Joscelin, and the Lusignans, the other around Raymond of Tripoli and the old baronial families ^[2].

In 1183, too ill to campaign, Baldwin appointed Guy regent, then watched him mishandle the confrontation with Saladin's invading army at the springs of Goliath. Furious, the king dismissed Guy, resumed personal rule though blind and crippled, and had his five-year-old nephew crowned co-king as Baldwin V in November 1183 to shut Guy out of the succession ^[5]. When Saladin besieged Kerak that winter, interrupting a wedding feast inside the castle, Baldwin accompanied the relief army in his litter, and the siege was raised ^[4]. He even attempted, unsuccessfully, to have Sibylla's marriage to Guy annulled.

By 1184 the king was dying and the kingdom knew it. Baldwin sent Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem and the masters of the Temple and Hospital on an embassy to the courts of western Europe, offering the keys of the Holy Sepulchre to Henry II of England and Philip II of France in the hope that a great western king would take up the defense of Jerusalem. The mission returned with money and sympathy but no king ^[5].

Early in 1185 Baldwin summoned the High Court to settle the government after his death. Raymond of Tripoli was named regent for the child Baldwin V, while the boy's physical custody went to Joscelin of Courtenay, and it was agreed that if the sickly child died before coming of age, the succession between Sibylla and her half-sister Isabella would be referred to the pope, the western emperor, and the kings of France and England ^[2].

Baldwin IV died in Jerusalem on 16 March 1185, aged twenty-three, and was buried beside his ancestors in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ^[1]. The arrangements he made did not hold. Baldwin V died in the summer of 1186, Sibylla and Guy seized the crown in a swift coup, and on 4 July 1187 Guy led the kingdom's entire army to annihilation at the Horns of Hattin. Jerusalem itself surrendered to Saladin that October, two and a half years after the leper king's death ^[4].

Assessments of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem achievements have shifted over the centuries. Some older scholarship, following the tone of Steven Runciman's history of the crusades, treated the reign as a tragic interlude in which a dying boy presided over an unsolvable succession problem ^[6]. More recent work, above all Bernard Hamilton's full-length study The Leper King and His Heirs, argues that Baldwin was an able and determined ruler whose defensive victories repeatedly frustrated Saladin, and that the catastrophe of 1187 followed from decisions taken after his death rather than from his own failures ^[5].

His contemporaries found his conduct extraordinary. Leprosy carried heavy social stigma in the medieval world, and sufferers were commonly segregated, yet the Franks of Jerusalem kept a leper on the throne for eleven years and followed him into battle. William of Tyre, who loved his former pupil, presented the king's persistence in office as a kind of daily martyrdom, and even Muslim chroniclers noted the respect the young king commanded ^[1]. The kingdom maintained a religious order, the Order of Saint Lazarus, devoted to knights with leprosy, and Baldwin's own condition gave the order's ideal of the fighting leper its most famous embodiment ^[3].

Every Baldwin IV of Jerusalem biography now reaches a wide audience beyond academic history. He appears as a masked, soft-spoken monarch played by Edward Norton in Ridley Scott's 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven, a portrayal that took liberties with events but fixed the image of the leper king in popular culture ^[7]. Among historians of the crusades his reign remains a case study in how far will and legitimacy could carry a medieval ruler against overwhelming physical odds.