The man known to history as King Baldwin IV
of Jerusalem was born at some point in the early summer of 1161. The exact date of his birth is not known,
nor is the location, though it is usually assumed that it was in the city of Jerusalem. His father was Amalric, Count of Jaffa and
Ascalon. As count he was one of the foremost lords
of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, hardly surprising given that he was a member of the royal family
and his brother was King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. The young Baldwin was named after his uncle,
the king, who also stood as godfather for the new-born when he was baptised in 1161. Baldwin, though, would never know the monarch
for whom he was named. In February 1163 Baldwin III died, most likely
from complications owing to dysentery, though suspicions arose that he was poisoned. Childless at just 33 years of age, his death
paved the way for his brother Amalric to succeed as King of Jerusalem. With this, Baldwin, who was still shy of his
second birthday, became the heir to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Baldwin’s mother was Agnes of Courtenay,
a scion of the House of Courtenay which had branches back in Western Europe and in the
Holy Land, her father Joscelin having been Count of Edessa. She was also closely related to the royal
line of Jerusalem. She and Amalric had one other child beyond
Baldwin, a daughter named Sibylla who was born either in 1158 or 1159 and so was Baldwin’s
older sister. Sibylla would play a major role in Baldwin’s
life. His mother, though, would never be Queen of
Jerusalem. At the time of the death of Baldwin III in
the spring of 1163, as Amalric was preparing to succeed his brother, the religious authorities
of Jerusalem and other bishoprics of the Crusader States had objected to Agnes becoming queen,
claiming that she and Amalric were too closely related for their marriage back in 1157 to
have been given church approval. The pair were only related in the fourth degree,
a hardly unusual circumstance in the marriage of royals and nobles in medieval times, and
so the objection to Agnes becoming queen must have been the result of some unclear political
intrigue. Whatever the precise reasons were, Amalric
caved to the church’s demands. He declared his marriage to Agnes void and
became king, remarrying in 1167 to Maria Komnene, a grandniece of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel
I. This second marriage would result in just
one daughter and so Baldwin remained the undisputed heir to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, even though he had been forced
to renounce her in 1163, Agnes remained a powerful figure at the royal court in Jerusalem
throughout the 1160s, 1170s and early 1180s during Baldwin’s later reign. Baldwin was born in the Crusader States of
the Holy Land. These had only existed for just over a half
a century. Back in the early days of Christianity in
late antiquity, the Eastern Mediterranean had been the heartland of the Christian church,
but in the middle of the seventh century the Levant, parts of Asia Minor and west into
North Africa had all been conquered by the Arabs and people there converted to Islam
for the most part in the seventh and eighth centuries. The Arab Muslims had been relatively tolerant
of Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem over the centuries, but the Turks who conquered
large parts of the region in the eleventh century were less so. It was in response to the expansion of Turkish
power in the second half of the eleventh century that the First Crusade was preached by Pope
Urban II in Western Europe in 1095. Tens of thousands took the cross and headed
east. Between 1097 and 1099 they succeeded in conquering
most of the Levant, finally entering Jerusalem in July 1099. With this, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County
of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa, were set up in the Holy
Land as Christian Crusader states. The most senior of these were the rulers of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The first of these was Godfrey of Bouillon,
one of the leaders of the First Crusade, who subsequently was acclaimed as King Godfrey
I of Jerusalem after the capture of the holy city in 1099. The Crusader region was referred to back in
Western Christendom over the next two centuries as Outremer, meaning ‘Overseas’, though
many historians today refer to the region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as
either the Crusader States or the Latin East, or even as the Frankish kingdoms in recognition
that many of the main Crusader lords came from what had been the Kingdom of the Franks
back in Western Europe. Indeed, the Muslims of the Levant came to
refer to them collectively as ‘the Franks’. In the early twelfth century the Crusader
States began to emerge as settled polities, with Italian merchants operating out of ports
such as Acre and connecting it with Western Christendom, with several orders of religious
knights such as the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitallers emerging as powerful
orders of holy warriors. But the Muslim response was also quick in
coming. Muslim lords such as Imad al-Din, better known
as Zengi, and Nur ad-Din, operating out of Syria, Egypt and northern Mesopotamia, began
battling extensively with the Crusader states from the 1120s onwards. In 1144 the city of Edessa fell to the Muslims,
leading to a new crusade being preached back in Europe. The Second Crusade had been more extensive
than the First Crusade, bringing both King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of
Germany to the Holy Land with tens of thousands of warriors. It was a sign of the stiff resistance which
the Christians now faced in the Levant that this Second Crusade was far less successful
than the First, with little new land brought under the control of the Crusader States,
though after the Second Crusade, in 1153, King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, young Baldwin’s
uncle, had succeeded in seizing Ascalon, one of the few urban centres in the Levant which
the Fatimid rulers of Egypt had managed to retain control of since the First Crusade. But when his brother, Baldwin’s father Almaric,
succeeded him in 1163, after Baldwin III died childless, he would face a major threat in
the shape of Nur ad-Din. This was the context in which Baldwin IV’s
life and reign would play out.
Before exploring the life of Baldwin, it is worth pausing to briefly consider the nature
of the historical sources which are available for the Crusader Sates at this time. In general the High Middle Ages are a period
for which there is nothing like the abundant amount of bureaucratic, governmental and judicial
records which survive for more modern times, or even extensive correspondence. This is doubly the case for the Crusader states
of the Holy Land where what records were produced in the twelfth century were generally lost
and destroyed as the Crusader states collapsed in the course of the thirteenth century. Owing to this we are especially reliant on
a number of chronicles written by contemporary historians. Two of these were written by figures that
were present in Outremer during Baldwin’s times and who were eye-witnesses to much of
the events they describe. The Chronicle of William of Tyre, the archbishop
of Tyre between 1175 and his death in 1186, is especially valuable as William was a tutor
to Baldwin in his youth, played a role in diagnosing the future king with leprosy in
his childhood years and was central to the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem throughout
Baldwin’s reign. Another valuable contemporary source is the
Chronicle of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer. This was written by Ernoul, a squire of Balian
of Ibelin, a Crusader lord of the 1170s and 1180s. Ernoul’s Chronicle provides a history of
the Crusader states from 1100 to 1228 and is a valuable source for Baldwin’s life
from an individual who was a teenager there in the early 1180s. While these are the two most important sources
for Baldwin’s life, there are others which provide some ancillary details, notably a
number of Latin chronicles written by figures in Western Europe who related the news that
arrived in England, France and other regions from the Holy Land during Baldwin’s reign,
while the Libellus de Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, meaning roughly The
book of the conquest of the Holy Land by Saladin, written by an anonymous knight who was present
in the Holy Land in the 1180s provides some important details on developments there in
the mid-1180s around the time of Baldwin’s death. There are also numerous Arabic and Byzantine
chronicles and histories of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries that shed light on
Baldwin’s reign. As such, there are a good number of different
sources available for Baldwin’s life, but inevitably there are still considerable limitations
to what we can decipher about a monarch who lived over 800 years ago. From the sources which we have, we know a
good deal about how Baldwin was brought up and educated. He would have spent much of his early life
in Jerusalem, rarely venturing beyond the city in a land where the Christians held the
towns and cities, but where the countryside was prone to attacks by Muslim bands. In Jerusalem Baldwin would have grown up at
a court which had more of a military feel than even those back in medieval Europe, one
in which every ruler knew beyond a doubt that his primary role was to defend his state against
Muslim incursions and to try to reclaim further territories for the church, a land where even
monks wore armour and carried weapons. In 1170, William of Tyre, the man who would
later write a chronicle of Baldwin’s reign, returned from the capital of the Byzantine
Empire, Constantinople, where Amalric had dispatched him on a diplomatic mission. When he reached Jerusalem, the king appointed
him as tutor to his son, as William, who by then was an archdeacon, was widely recognised
as one of the most learned figures in Outremer. The dual nature of the Christian Crusader
States as polities in which Christians and Muslims often lived side by side was seen
in Baldwin’s education in other spheres. It was an Arab by the name of Abul’Khair
who taught Baldwin to ride a horse.
Baldwin’s early years and education were highly significant in other respects. He was sent to live for lengthy periods of
time in the household of William of Tyre and it was while he was there that William first
noticed the symptoms of Baldwin’s leprosy. In later years he recounted his discovery
in the following way: “While he was staying with me…it happened
that, as he was playing with some boys of noble birth who were with him and they were
pinching each other on the arms and hands with their nails, as children often do when
playing together, the others cried out when they were hurt, whereas he bore it all with
great patience, like one who is used to pain, although his friends did not spare him in
any way. When this had happened several times, and
I was told about it, I thought it was a consequence of his patient disposition, not of his insensitivity
to pain, and calling him to me I began to ask him questions about it. And finally I came to realise that half of
his right arm and hand was dead, so that he could not feel the pinchings at all, or even
feel if he was bitten. Then I began to feel uncertain in my mind,
recalling the words of the wise man who said: ‘It is a certainty that a limb which is
without feeling is not conducive to health and that a sick man who does not feel himself
to be so incurs great danger.’ His father was told, and after the doctors
had been consulted, careful attempts were made to help him with poultices, ointments
and even charms, but all in vain. For with the passage of time we came to understand
more clearly that this marked the beginning of a more serious and totally incurable disease. It grieves me greatly to say this, but when
he became an adolescent, he was seen to be suffering from leprosy to a dangerous degree.” Another sign of the cultural tolerance which
existed in the Crusader States at this time was seen in the hiring of Arab doctors to
treat Baldwin, chief amongst them Abu Sulayman Dawud, but there was no cure for Baldwin’s
leprosy or even an effective treatment. His leprosy would come to define his life
in many ways, as will become clear. The disease that his son and heir was suffering
from was not King Amalric’s only concern. He had begun his reign by taking the offensive
against the Muslims that bordered on the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The main power at this time was the Fatimid
Caliphate which ruled Egypt and adjoining lands, a power which had been in decline for
some time, in part because of the expansion of the Turkic Muslim powers further to the
north who had controlled the Levant prior to the arrival of the First Crusade. The Fatimids experienced a period of intense
internal instability and famine throughout the 1160s and Amalric was able to campaign
effectively against them in the first year of his reign, consolidating the southern frontier
of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But matters were very different to the north. In the early autumn of 1164, news arrived
in Jerusalem that Nur ad-Din, the Turkic Muslim ruler of Syria, had defeated a crusader force
of the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch at the Battle of Harim, obliterating
or capturing thousands of Crusader knights and soldiers, a costly defeat which the Crusader
States could ill afford at a time when reinforcement from Western Europe was the only way of making
up for such losses on the battlefield. Defeat at Harim put the Crusaders on the defensive
for several years to come. It was at this juncture that Amalric entered
negotiations with the Byzantines that resulted in him marrying Maria Komnene in order to
acquire military aid from the Greeks.
It was several years after the disaster at Harim when Amalric learned of his son’s
condition. It was most likely kept secret to begin with
and there may even have been some doubt as to whether the diagnosis was correct. Baldwin did not appear to have any visible
physical symptoms of leprosy during his youth and the diagnosis was made purely on the basis
of his lack of nerve sensation. The royal family would also have been reluctant
to publicise the illness of the king’s son. Leprosy carried an enormous social stigma
at the time, the belief being that the disease was something of an affliction visited on
individuals by god for some perceived wrongdoing. Consider the following passage on leprosy
from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was
despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried
our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.” Scholars have speculated that the Christians
of the Crusader States were more tolerant of leprosy than their brethren back in Western
Europe and indeed in the 1140s the Order of St Lazarus had been established in Jerusalem
for the care of lepers. However, there was still no doubt that Baldwin’s
condition would be enormously problematic, not least because lepers were largely expected
to segregate themselves away from wider society, the belief in the contagious nature of leprosy
being strong. Hansen’s Disease, to give it its modern
clinical name, is contagious, but it requires prolonged exposure to the bodily fluids of
those who carry it for someone to be infected. This was not known in pre-modern times, however. The expectation that someone like Baldwin
should shut himself away under the care of the Lazare house in Jerusalem was impractical
for a king in waiting whose primary duty was to lead armies, something which would become
nigh on impossible as his condition deteriorated in years to come but which Baldwin would still
rise to challenge of doing. Amalric was aware of all of this and was concerned
about the succession as a result, something which may have informed his decision to remarry
in 1167, but he would find no solution before his own premature death, the latest in a long
line of Kings of Jerusalem to die young. In 1174, after the death of Nur ad-Din, the
great nemesis of his reign, Amalric had laid siege to the town of Banias. Eventually he had to given up on this, realising
that the town was not worth the resources that would have required to maintain a long
siege. It was while heading back to Jerusalem from
Banias that he fell ill with dysentery. Though easily treatable in an age of antibiotics,
medicines and clean water, dysentery was often fatal in pre-modern times, and so it proved
to be in Amalric’s case. His condition deteriorated in the days that
followed and back in Jerusalem he began running a severe fever. Despite being attended by a range of Latin,
Greek and Arab doctors in the days that followed, nothing effective could be done and Amalric
died on the 11th of July 1174 at just 38 years of age. With that, Baldwin, who was approximately
13 years old at the time, succeeded as King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. Owing to this youth a regency government would
control affairs until he reached his majority, which was deemed to be at age 15. Initially Miles of Plancy, the seneschal of
Jerusalem, a senior magistrate in the city, assumed the position of regent, but within
a few weeks Raymond, Count of Tripoli, one of the senior-most nobles of Outremer, arrived
in Jerusalem and declared his intention to rule as regent during Baldwin’s minority.
The two years of Baldwin’s minority rule were important in framing the circumstances
in which Baldwin would reign in his own right from 1176 onwards. The death of Nur ad-Din had left something
of a political vacuum in Syria. It was quickly filled by a noted warrior of
a scholarly disposition who had emerged in the 1160s under Nur ad-Din’s wing. This was Yusuf ibn Ayyub, a warlord who hailed
from Tikrit in what is now Iraq. He is better known by the Arabic laqab or
epithet which he acquired in later life, Salah ad-Din or Saladin, meaning the ‘Righteousness
of the Faith’. In the mid-1160s Saladin had gone to Egypt
with Nur ad-Din’s blessing to shore up the Muslim position there as the Fatimid Caliphate
was in crisis. In 1171, following the death of the last Fatimid
Caliph, Saladin effectively brought the Egyptian Caliphate to an end and realigned it with
the Islamic Caliphate in Baghdad. Then, in the mid-1170s following Nur ad-Din’s
death he seized power to a large extent in Syria as well. What this meant was that the Crusader States,
and Baldwin as the chief ruler amongst them, now faced a skilled Muslim warlord who could
strike at Outremer from both the north out of Syria and the south out of Egypt, while
also controlling much of the Arabian Peninsula. In Jerusalem, even as a teenager, Baldwin
knew that the threat posed by Saladin and the Ayyubids was a major issue that would
have implications for his reign. Our sources make it fairly clear that from
early on in his reign he was considering the succession already and his role as ruler of
Jerusalem. His leprosy precluded the possibility of marriage
and of siring children of his own. He did not have a brother to whom the throne
might easily descend, but unlike some Christian kingdoms back in the Latin West, women were
not precluded from the succession in Outremer. Indeed, Baldwin’s grandmother, Melisende,
had ruled as Queen of Jerusalem either on her own or as a co-ruler for much of the period
between the death of her father, King Baldwin II, in 1131 and when her own son, Baldwin
III, began to rule in his own stead in the 1150s. As a result, it was clear to many in Jerusalem
that Baldwin IV’s sister, Sibylla, offered a clear line of succession within the kingdom. This was further cemented in the mid-1170s
when Sibylla married William of Montferrat, known by the epithet ‘Longsword’, an indication
of his military prowess. It seems that Baldwin may have been preparing
to abdicate in favour of William and Sibylla when William was well enough prepared for
the role. However, his plan was quickly scuppered. William died in 1177, most likely from malaria,
though not before Sibylla fell pregnant with a son who would subsequently be christened
Baldwin after his uncle the king.
In response to the death of William in 1177, Baldwin moved to appoint Raynald of Chatillon
as the new regent. As a king who could not campaign for sustained
periods of time against Saladin and other Muslim warlords, Baldwin needed someone who
could do so on his behalf, especially so in regions far from Jerusalem. Raynald was an ideal candidate. He was born in France and had only arrived
in Outremer in the late 1140s as part of the Second Crusade, becoming a substantial force
for a time in the Principality of Antioch during the 1150s, but in more recent years
he had established himself as the most aggressive of the Crusaders nobles, though a ruthless
one who launched raids on Cyprus and the Byzantine Empire in an effort to aggrandize himself
at the expense of his neighbours, be they Christian or Muslim. Around the time of Baldwin’s birth in the
early 1160s Raynald had been captured by the Muslims of Syria and had spent many years
in captivity, but in 1176 he had been released on payment of a large ransom. With this he established himself as the Lord
of Oultrejordain, a principality to the southeast of the Dead Sea in what is now Jordan, by
marrying the lady of the territory, Stephanie of Milly. There Raynald quickly developed a reputation
for his aggressive attacks on the Ayyubid trade and caravan routes between Egypt and
their wider territories in Syria and Mesopotamia, sundering connections between the two parts
of Saladin’s growing sphere of control. Having proved himself in this capacity, Baldwin
and his advisors determined that Raynald was the best individual to appoint as regent and
military commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1177. His decision to do so was owing to deteriorating
health, Baldwin having seemingly become ill from whatever had killed William Longsword
around the same time. Raynald soon distinguished himself in one
of the most significant military encounters between the Christian Crusaders and the Muslim
lords of the Levant and Egypt during the twelfth century, the Battle of Montgisard. Baldwin was involved in this as well. The clash took place against diplomatic efforts
by Baldwin to form a new alliance with the Byzantine Empire, Manuel I Komnenos, with
the aim of launching a fresh expedition into Egypt. Baldwin’s efforts to do so were seemingly
aided by the arrival of Philip, Count of Flanders in the Low Countries, to the Holy Land in
August 1177 with extensive resources. Philip landed at the port of Acre and immediately
sent word to Jerusalem to Baldwin who was Philip’s cousin. Baldwin viewed Philip’s arrival as a potential
mechanism to allow him to withdraw from the kingship, offering Philip the regency, but
Philip refused and also balked at the idea of campaigning into Egypt. Instead he headed to Tripoli with his forces
to join up with Raymond III, Count of Tripoli, for an attack on the city of Harim in Saladin’s
territory in Syria. Alerted to the movement of hundreds of Crusader
knights and auxiliary forces towards Harim, Saladin now decided to strike into the Kingdom
of Jerusalem while the Crusader resources were deployed far to the north.
Though his illness generally precluded Baldwin from sustained military campaigning himself,
in the military emergency which now developed he had no option but to oversee the gathering
of what resources and men could be mustered and to lead the defence of Jerusalem and the
surrounding region against Saladin’s incursion in November 1177. The figures for such military engagements
are notoriously unreliable. The Christian chroniclers, for instance, suggest
that Saladin led a host of upwards of 25,000 men into the Kingdom that early winter, which
was surely an exaggeration, but the idea that Baldwin and Raynald only had a few hundred
knights and several thousand auxiliary soldiers to defend the Kingdom with was probably more
accurate. His initial goal was to protect the city of
Ascalon, but after learning of Saladin’s attacks on numerous Christian settlements
further inland, Baldwin moved eastwards away from the coastal region. His and Saladin’s forces would eventually
meet on the 25th of November 1177. The exact location of the Battle of Montgisard
is unclear, though scholars agree it took place somewhere in the Ramla region lying
to the south of what is now Tel Aviv-Yafo and northeast of Ashdod. Here Baldwin’s forces needed victory in
order to prevent Saladin capturing extensive territory, or potentially even marching on
Jerusalem itself. The arrival of Baldwin and his men around
Montgisard took Saladin by surprise. He had not expected the Crusaders to leave
the safety of Ascalon and other cities while so much of their forces were far away to the
north in Syria. Thus, on the 25th, at the Battle of Montgisard,
Baldwin and Raynald caught Saladin’s forces by surprise. Not all of his army was arraigned here and
Saladin had dispersed some of his units to scour the surrounding countryside. Hence the Muslim commander was taken by surprise
and cut off with only some of his men when the Crusaders charged at them near Montgisard. Raynald and Baldwin, the latter of whom despite
his leprosy was known to have been a skilful horse-rider in his youth, led a cavalry charge
straight towards the centre of Saladin’s lines with his heavy cavalry. The result was a complete rout as Saladin
tried to form up his battle lines properly and then ordered a retreat. This manoeuvre became chaotic, and as Raynald’s
and Baldwin’s units chased after the Muslim forces many of Saladin’s men, his great-nephew
included, were cut down. The slaughter was compounded by the fall of
darkness, which made the retreat even more disjointed. Then, to compound matters, in the two days
that followed Baldwin, Raynald and their men were able to identify pockets of Saladin’s
men in the surrounding countryside, cutting them off and taking many prisoners. The Battle of Montgisard was a consummate
victory for the Crusader cause, one which insured the safety of Jerusalem for several
years to come as Saladin regrouped. Despite his physical limitations, Baldwin
had won a major victory. The victory at Montgisard was a galvanizing
episode for Baldwin, one which shored up support for the monarchy in Jerusalem after years
of intrigue surrounding the king whose leprosy was viewed as a sign of god’s ill judgement. Now others thought differently. Rumours spread of St George having been seen
on the field of battle near Baldwin during the clash. To commemorate the victory and make the most
of it from a propaganda perspective it was determined that a Benedictine monastery would
be erected at the site of the clash in honour of St Catherine, on whose feast day the battle
had occurred. Meanwhile, to the north in Syria Philip of
Flanders and the other Crusader lords there reached an agreement whereby they would abandon
the siege of Harim in return for the ceding of some minor lands and villages to the Crusader
States from the Muslims. With that Philip left to return to Europe,
bringing to an end his own personal crusade.
In Jerusalem Baldwin began to associate himself more closely in the late 1170s with his sister,
making it clear that if he was to die soon without a clear successor having emerged,
Sibylla would rule on behalf of her infant son who had just been born and christened
Baldwin in honour of the king. This was not a case of joint rule at this
juncture, though as his health declined further in years to come it would become something
akin to this. In the main he was able to begin stamping
his authority to a greater extent in the aftermath of Montgisard as he entered into his adult
years. Under Baldwin, Jerusalem continued as a city
of religious toleration, to a fair degree, with the young king inclined, much like both
his father and uncle had been as kings of Jerusalem, to allow Muslims access to the
city, the third holiest in Islam after Mecca and Medina, and to form a relatively cosmopolitan
polity in line with his upbringing with some Arab tutors and doctors. Baldwin, his father Amalric and his brother,
Baldwin III, were at heart largely scholar kings with an interest in the law and literature,
rather than being strictly warrior kings. Consequently, as limited in length as Baldwin’s
reign would be, there was a cerebral quality to it above and beyond the near incessant
clashes between Muslim and Christian across Outremer. With his newfound role as a substantial leader
in the aftermath of Montgisard, Baldwin became a more regular war leader in the years that
followed. But it proved nearly impossible to recreate
the success of the early winter of 1177. While the Battle of Montgisard had ended in
victory, it had also cost the Crusaders men and, in a region where reinforcements nearly
always had to arrive from the faraway Latin West, this backup was slow in coming. Broad based Crusades were only ever preached
in response to disasters in the Levant, such as the loss of Edessa which instigated the
Second Crusade in the mid-1140s. Successes like Montgisard did not. Instead, when matters were going well for
the Christian cause in the Levant, the rulers of Western Europe ignored it and continued
their own petty squabbles back in France, England and Germany. Thus, Baldwin’s armies were reduced in size
at the end of the 1170s. Saladin, who could acquire many reinforcements
when he needed them, realised this and so quickly recovered from the defeat at Montgisard
and in 1179 launched a new military incursion against the Crusader States. This was in response to a raid which Baldwin
led into Syria that spring. These movements culminated on the 10th of
June 1179, in the Battle of Marj Ayyun near Sidon. Here Baldwin and his allies, including the
master of the Knights Templar and Raymond of Tripoli, succeeded in defeating an initial
Muslim force, but in the aftermath Saladin’s main force arrived and inflicted a serious
defeat on the Christians. The defeat at the Battle of Marj Ayyun was
nearly fatal for Baldwin. In the midst of it he was unhorsed and while
he was still able to ride at this juncture, he could not remount his horse unaided. In the end the king had to be rushed from
the battlefield being carried on the back of a Crusader knight while his personal bodyguard
fought their way out of the Muslim forces that had surrounded Baldwin and his entourage. Hence, the King of Jerusalem barely escaped
with his life from the battlefield. Others were less fortunate. Many Christian knights and soldiers were killed
or taken prisoner. Amongst the prisoners was Odo of St Amand,
the grand master of the Knights Templar. He would die in captivity the following year. Count Raymond of Tripoli only barely escaped
from the fighting. Overall the Battle of Marj Ayyun was a disaster
for the Crusader cause, reversing the victory a year and a half earlier at Montgisard. Where Baldwin had hoped to follow up that
initial success by expanding his domain, in the aftermath of Marj Ayyun, as the 1180s
dawned, the Crusaders were now on the back foot, with a dwindling amount of military
resources and were forced to adopt a defensive posture. Saladin, by way of contrast, was buoyant. After the Battle of Marj Ayyun he immediately
moved to strike at the castle of Chastelet. Baldwin had ordered the construction of this
structure the previous year overlooking Jacob’s Ford, one of the larger fords of the upper
course of the Jordan River. The castle was virtually complete by the summer
of 1179 and now formed an important Crusader stronghold on the main route between the Galilee
region eastwards through the Golan Heights and into Syria. Unhappy with the new Christian construction,
Saladin decided to destroy it just weeks after Marj Ayyun, having previously attempted to
bribe Baldwin into ceasing construction at Jacob’s Ford. When that failed, and with Baldwin and the
other Crusader lords reeling from the defeat at Marj Ayyun, he initiated a siege on the
23rd of August which lasted for just over a week before a tunnel was successfully dug
under the walls and a fire lit, collapsing the walls through a siege method known as
sapping. With this, the Muslims burst into the fortress,
killing many of the Crusaders and taking several hundred prisoners in another major defeat
for Baldwin. The castle was left abandoned with the walls
semi-collapsed, though some of their ruins are still visible today eight and a half centuries
later. The victory was also not without cost for
Saladin as an outbreak of disease occurred amongst his men after seizing Chastelet, and
claimed many Muslim soldiers. Back in Jerusalem, as the full scale of the
military reverse which had occurred in the summer of 1179 became clear, political measures
were taken to try to acquire greater support from the Latin West for the Crusader cause
in the east and to shore up the government in Jerusalem itself. At the heart of this were the royal family
and a newcomer to the Holy Land, Guy of Lusignan. Guy was a French knight who arrived in the
Levant at some juncture in the second half of the 1170s. The exact time of his appearance remains a
matter of debate, but he was clearly in Jerusalem by 1179 when the disastrous Christian defeats
at Marj Ayyun and Jacob’s Ford occurred, or shortly thereafter. In the months that followed he and his supporters
gained the ear of Baldwin’s mother Agnes and she was soon promoting the idea that her
daughter, Baldwin’s sister, Sibylla, a widow since the death of William Longsword in 1177,
should marry Guy. These developments came to a head in Easter
week of 1180, when a marriage alliance between Guy and Sibylla was formed with Baldwin’s
blessing. William of Tyre informs us that the reason
for the marriage alliance was in order to gain Guy’s aid in forestalling a plot by
Count Raymond of Tripoli and Prince Bohemond of Antioch to overthrow Baldwin, though William
himself was absent from Jerusalem at this time and was not an eyewitness to these events. Whatever the truth of it may have been, the
result is reasonably clear. Guy married Sibylla, bringing fresh support
to Baldwin’s kingship in the shape of the Lusignan faction that shored up the king’s
position in the aftermath of the defeats of 1179.
It was not just Guy and the supporters of Lusignan that Baldwin was seeking to acquire
aid from in 1180. In the immediate aftermath of the marriage,
Baldwin dispatched one of his closest advisors and ministers and a near relative on his mother’s
side, Joscelin of Courtenay to Constantinople, the goal being to allay the concerns which
the emperor there may have had about the diplomatic reorientation in Jerusalem and to appeal for
fresh aid from the Byzantines. However, at Constantinople Joscelin’s mission
stalled as Emperor Manuel I died there in September 1180 and was succeeded by his eleven
year old son, Alexios II, initiating a regency government which was in little position to
offer immediate aid to the Crusader States. Envoys to Western Europe dispatched through
the Knights Templar, which had become a powerful institution in Western Christendom by that
time, initially held out the hope of a major new crusade in response to the defeats in
the Levant of 1179. Pope Alexander III responded by sending out
missives to many monarchs and lords in Europe, notably King Philip II of France and King
Henry II of England. These would fall on deaf ears for the most
part, though it is noteworthy that Alexander’s petitions included a searing attack on Baldwin,
claiming that Saladin’s victories in 1179 at Marj Ayyun and Jacob’s Ford were the
result of Baldwin’s leprosy, which in turn was portrayed as a symptom of god’s judgement
of the sins of the Crusaders. It is typically assumed that it was this Papal
condemnation of Baldwin’s illness that inspired William of Tyre to begin writing his chronicle
as a defence of Baldwin, his former pupil. While little material support was forthcoming
from the west to the Christians of the Levant in the early 1180s, circumstances were nevertheless
improving for Baldwin and the Crusader lords there during these years. A reconciliation of a kind was reached between
Baldwin and Guy of Lusignan on the one hand and Raymond of Tripoli on the other, the latter
of which had aspired to seize the throne of Jerusalem for a time. With this rapprochement the Crusaders assembled
their forces and were able to meet Saladin’s armies again in the field at La Fortelet in
the south of the Galilee region in July of 1182. At this battle, where Baldwin was again present
in person to command the Crusader forces, the Christians won a notable victory, the
first sign of changing fortunes since the series of defeats in the summer of 1179. Saladin made a further effort to strike that
summer against Beirut, but Baldwin, Guy and Raymond, assisted by a small contingent of
reinforcements from Germany and Italy led by Duke Henry of Lotharingia and financed
by the merchants of the port city of Pisa in Italy, were able to fend off the attack. Thereafter Raynald of Chatillon recommenced
the attacks he had engaged in several years earlier against the Arab caravan routes passing
through Jordan and the Sinai Peninsula. He even managed to launch five Crusader warships
on the Red Sea near the Gulf of Aqaba, a feat never before accomplished by the Crusaders. These attacks on Muslim shipping ranged from
Yemen northwards to Saladin’s other territories. In 1183 a Christian force even penetrated
Arabia to within a day’s march of Medina. Thus, while 1179 had seen major reverses for
the Crusader States and while Pope Alexander might have criticised Baldwin to the rest
of Christendom in 1181, the two years that followed saw a resurgence of Christian power
in the Middle East.
While 1182 and 1183 had seen some successes, Baldwin’s own personal circumstances were
not good. His health had begun to decline precipitously
in the early 1180s. By 1182 his leprosy had degenerated to the
point where he was largely blind and crippled. He could barely use his hands or feet unaided. William of Tyre presents the following description
of the degeneration of Baldwin’s health: “Day by day his condition became worse. The extremities and face were especially attacked,
so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him…In
addition, the leprosy which had begun to trouble him at the beginning of his reign — in fact,
in very early youth — became much worse than usual. His sight failed and his extremities were
covered with ulcerations so that he was unable to use either his hands or his feet. Yet up to this time he had declined to heed
the suggestion offered by some that he lay aside his kingly dignity and give up the administration
of the realm.” Despite these ailments, there was resilience
to Baldwin. A good horse-rider in his youth, when he lost
the ability to ride at the front of his armies he insisted on still campaigning, being carried
on a litter. In Jerusalem he attended councils of state
even when ill. These councils often focused on the problems
of continuing to finance the military campaigns and in February 1183 Baldwin was forced to
impose a tax known as the curia generalis, a general levy of 1% of the value of property
and 2% of all incomes. There is no evidence to suggest that Baldwin
would have attended these council meetings wearing a mask of any kind as some popular
modern depictions of him have suggested. Instead his advisors, the Crusader lords and
the heads of the religious orders, would have seen directly the deteriorating physical state
of their king, his face a growing mass of scabs and necrotic scars. Most would have known that he did not have
long left in the world. By 1184 Baldwin’s situation had declined
to the extent that he effectively established his nephew, Sibylla’s son Baldwin from her
first marriage to the deceased William of Montferrat, as his official co-ruler. Clearly the young Baldwin, who was only six
years of age, did not perform this role in any capacity himself, but what it did mean
was that power was being shared to an even greater extent with Sibylla and her second
husband, Guy of Lusignan. This arrangement was fractious. Guy was a heavy-handed figure, one who increasingly
treated the severely ill king with disdain, refusing to grant him the city of Tyre, part
of Guy’s territory, when Baldwin offered to leave Guy in charge of Jerusalem in exchange,
the king wishing to reside at Tyre on the coast in his final days where proximity to
the Mediterranean seemed to aid his condition, perhaps the additional moisture in the air
relieving the torment to his skin. Further agitation followed when Guy’s actions
nearly led to the loss of Kerak Castle in Jordan, while in 1184 Guy massacred a contingent
of Bedouin in the Negev region who had previously allied with the Crusaders, actions which Baldwin
strongly condemned.
There was one last effort made by Baldwin to secure aid from the Latin West, though
unbeknownst to Guy and others in Outremer the mission was also launched with orders
from Baldwin to consult with the Christian lords back in Western Europe on the succession
to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Ideally Baldwin was seeking a western prince
who would come to the Levant and rule in association with him, allowing him to live his last years
in peace while also circumventing the perennially feuding Crusader lords such as his brother-in-law,
Guy of Lusignan, Raynald of Chatillon and Count Raymond of Tripoli. The mission was led by Heraclius, the Latin
Patriarch of Jerusalem and Archbishop of Caesarea, the leading Christian religious figure in
the Levant. In 1184 he was dispatched across the Mediterranean
along with Roger de Moulins, the Grand Master of one of the major religious orders, the
Knights Hospitallers, and the new Grand Master of the Templars, Arnold of Torraja. The trio took with them several relics and
the keys of both the gates of Jerusalem and the doors of the Holy Sepulchre, the most
holy church in the Levant in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem. In Europe Heraclius visited Italy, France
and England. Like many such envoys before and afterwards
he received grand promises from the monarchs and lords of Western Christendom about their
intentions to head on Crusade to Outremer, but they all proved lacklustre. In 1185 he returned to Jerusalem with a promise
from Henry II of England that he would soon follow with an army to reinforce Baldwin’s
position, but it never materialised. By the time Heraclius returned to Outremer,
the king who had sent him to Western Europe was dead. Baldwin’s rapid deterioration over the past
years came to a head in 1185. He died at some unknown date in the spring
of that year a few weeks short of his 24th birthday and certainly before the 16th of
May at which time his nephew was referred to as the sole King of Jerusalem. Sicardus of Cremona, a contemporary Italian
religious authority and historian who later ended up in the Levant himself as part of
the Fourth Crusade and who was involved in efforts to organise a new crusade in the 1180s
around the time Baldwin died, lauded Baldwin in an encomiastic passage in one of his writings,
declaring that although he had suffered greatly from leprosy from a young age, he had won
a notable victory over Saladin at Montgisard in 1177 and had preserved the Crusader States
during his reign. Baldwin was laid to rest in the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem at the foot of Mount Calvary near his father King Amalric’s
tomb and those of the other Latin kings who had ruled the Kingdom of Jerusalem since the
First Crusade. With Baldwin’s passing his nephew succeeded
as King Baldwin V of Jerusalem. A child nearing just eight years old, he was
unable to rule in his own right and a minority government headed by Raymond III, Count of
Tripoli, was set up to govern the Kingdom of Jerusalem until he came of age. That would never happen. He was dead himself a year later, the child
dying under murky circumstances in the early autumn of 1186, though many historians dispute
the inference of the chroniclers that Raymond had his charge poisoned in order to become
king himself. In any event, it was not Raymond who claimed
the throne after Baldwin V’s premature death, but instead Sibylla and her husband, Guy of
Lusignan, stepped into the breach. The accession of Guy as King of Jerusalem
in 1186 virtually guaranteed renewed war with the Muslims and Saladin. And so it proved. Clashes broke out in late 1186 and continued
into 1187. These culminated in July that year in the
Battle of Hattin to the west of the Sea of Galilee. In this, Saladin won a major victory and Guy
was captured along with Raynald of Chatillon who had caused Saladin such problems with
the caravan routes between Egypt and Syria for the better part of a decade. While Guy was kept prisoner, Saladin had Raynald
beheaded, proclaiming him to be nothing more than a bandit. With victory at Hattin and Guy imprisoned
in Damascus, Saladin now marched on Jerusalem and, after a short siege of two weeks in late
September and early October, the city fell to the Muslims after less than a century under
Christian Crusader control. With this calamitous development the call
went out to Western Europe for a new crusade. The Third Crusade is arguably the most famous
of them all, an engagement which pitted Richard the Lionheart, the King of England and lord
of extensive territories in France, against Saladin for several years in the early 1190s. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa,
was also involved, leading many to refer to the Third Crusade as the King’s Crusade. However, despite the fact that it drew both
Barbarossa and Richard the Lionheart to participate, the Third Crusade failed in its ultimate objective
of recapturing Jerusalem for the Christians. Though the holy city was so reclaimed forty
years later during the Sixth Crusade in 1229, this was only a brief hiatus. Ultimately, the Crusader cause was flagging
by then as the monarchs and lords of Europe continued to show a greater interest in fighting
each other than the Muslims of the Levant, while resources were also directed towards
failed expeditions to North Africa. Beginning in the 1250s the Crusader States
lost growing amounts of territory to new Muslim lords, concluding in 1291 with the fall of
Acre, the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land. The Crusader States came to an end two centuries
after they were first established. Baldwin IV’s reign as King of Jerusalem
was highly complex. He succeeded as the ruler of the kingdom when
he was barely a teenager and with the added complication of suffering from leprosy. It was clear from early on that he would never
produce an heir and so a succession crisis always overshadowed his time as King of Jerusalem. But despite these limitations his time as
king was successful in some respects. In particular the Crusader victory at the
Battle of Montgisard stalled the Muslim advance against the Crusaders in the 1170s, as did
some further military successes in the years that followed. Baldwin earned the respect of his contemporaries
for overseeing these efforts, but there was never any doubt that his reign was going to
be a brief one. In the end he died at just 23 years of age. When he did a fresh series of crises struck
the Crusader states in quick succession, notably the death of Baldwin V, the defeat at Hattin,
the imprisonment of King Guy by Saladin and the loss of Jerusalem. It was only with the fall of Jerusalem that
Western Christendom awoke to the scale of the threat posed by Saladin in the Levant. Had they provided aid and launched a Third
Crusade earlier during Baldwin’s reign one wonders whether Jerusalem would have fallen
and how the history of the Crusader States might have been different. What do you think of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem? Do you think if he had not been ill and had
lived longer that he might have been able to galvanise the Crusader States and have
prevented the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
