The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (35 page)

In the end, one of Baldwin’s closest childhood companions turned out to be the cleric and court historian William of Tyre. Appointed as tutor to the young prince around 1170, William was tasked to ‘train [the heir designate] in the formation of character as well as to instruct him in the knowledge of letters’ and a range of academic studies. William’s history of the Latin East offers a poignant and intimate character sketch of Baldwin as a boy. Bearing a marked physical resemblance to his father, even to the extent of mirroring the king’s gait in walking and his tone of voice, the prince was described as ‘a good-looking child for his age’, quick-witted, with an excellent memory, beloved of both learning and riding. Yet William also wrote with heart-rending honesty about a moment of dreadful revelation in Baldwin’s life.

One day, when he was nine years old and living in William’s household, the prince was playing with a group of noble-born boys. They were competing in a popular test of fortitude, ‘pinching each other on the arms and hands with their nails, as children often do’ to see who would cry out in pain. Despite their best efforts, no one was able to make Baldwin reveal the barest sign of discomfort. At first, it was assumed that this was simply a sign of his regal endurance, but William wrote:

Baldwin was, in fact, suffering from the early stages of leprosy. It is unlikely that a definite diagnosis was made at this point. The finest physicians were employed to oversee the prince’s care, including the Arab Christian Abu Sulaiman Dawud, and for the time being there seems to have been no further serious deterioration in his condition. So that Baldwin might still learn the quintessential knightly art of mounted warfare, Abu Sulaiman’s brother was appointed as the boy’s riding tutor. Trained to control a mount with his knees alone, leaving his working left arm free to wield a weapon, the prince became a remarkably skilful horseman.

Through the early 1170s Amalric sought a suitable husband for Princess Sibylla, hoping to secure the line of succession should an alternative to Baldwin prove necessary. But at the time of the king’s own unexpected death in 1174, no match for Sibylla had yet been found, and the only surviving child from his marriage to Maria Comnena was another girl, the infant Isabella. In July 1174 Prince Baldwin was far from an ideal candidate for the throne. Born of a union that had later been dissolved, he was just thirteen (and thus two years short of adulthood by the laws of the kingdom) and was known to be suffering from some form of debilitating illness. Nonetheless, the High Court agreed to his elevation, and Baldwin was duly crowned and anointed by the patriarch of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre on 15 July, the auspicious anniversary of that city’s conquest by the First Crusaders.

Historians used to regard Baldwin IV’s reign as an almost unmitigated disaster for the Latin East. Just as Saladin rose to power, emerging from Egypt to unite the Muslim world, so it was argued, Frankish Palestine was brought to its knees by a feeble and sickly monarch. Baldwin was criticised for selfishly retaining the crown long after the point when he should have abdicated, and blamed for ushering in an era of embittered and injurious factionalism, as Outremer’s nobility schemed for power and influence.

The young king’s reputation has been rejuvenated somewhat in recent years, with new emphasis being placed on the burden he shouldered due to deteriorating health, on the relative vitality of his early reign and on his determined efforts both to defend the realm and to find a viable successor. One truth, however, remains inviolate. The crusader states had been racked frequently by succession crises, often most deleteriously when a ruler died suddenly through battle, injury or ill health. Baldwin’s case was different, and the damage wrought during his reign was deeper, precisely because he did not die. Lingering on the throne, often requiring executive authority to be wielded by a form of regent during bouts of extreme infirmity, the leper king’s faltering rule eventually left Jerusalem in a precarious and vulnerable state of limbo.
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For the first two years of his reign Baldwin was a minor, and much of the work of government was directed by one of his cousins, Count Raymond III of Tripoli, acting as regent. Now in his early thirties, Raymond only recently had been released after nine years in Muslim captivity and was thus something of an unknown quantity. A slightly built, somewhat diminutive figure of swarthy complexion and piercing gaze, the count’s stiff deportment was allied to a rather aloof demeanour. Cautious by nature, he nevertheless was driven by ambition, and his marriage to one of the kingdom’s most eligible heiresses, Princess Eschiva of Galilee, marked him out as Jerusalem’s greatest vassal. As regent, he adopted a conciliatory approach in dealing with the High Court and avoided direct confrontation with Saladin, agreeing terms of truce in 1175 during the sultan’s drive towards Aleppo.

Raymond’s overriding concern through these years was the succession, for soon after his coronation Baldwin IV’s health went into terrible decline. Perhaps aggravated by the onset of puberty, his leprosy developed into the most grievous lepromatous form, and soon the telltale signs of the disease were unmistakeable, as his ‘extremities and face were especially attacked, so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him’. In time, he would be left unable to walk, see, barely even to speak, but for now he was doomed to suffer a grim decline into physical disability, punctuated by bouts of severe, incapacitating illness. The social and religious stigma attached to leprosy was immense. Commonly perceived as a curse from God, indicative of divine disfavour, the disease was also believed to be extremely contagious, usually prompting the segregation of sufferers from society.
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Baldwin’s situation was deeply problematic–as a monarch he was vulnerable to criticism and unable to provide stable rule; and in dynastic terms he could not perpetuate the royal line, in part because contemporaries believed that sexual contact transmitted leprosy, but also because Baldwin’s affliction rendered him infertile.

In many ways, hopes for the future thus rested with Baldwin’s sister, Sibylla. Her youth and sheltered convent upbringing meant that she was not well positioned to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother Melisende by assuming regnal authority in her own right. Raymond of Tripoli thus busied himself with the ongoing search for a suitable husband for Sibylla. The candidate eventually chosen was William of Montferrat, a north Italian noble who was cousin to two of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, King Louis VII of France and the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (the nephew of the Second Crusader King Conrad III of Germany). Sibylla and William of Montferrat were married in late 1176, but in June 1177 he fell ill and died, leaving Sibylla a pregnant widow. She later gave birth to their son Baldwin (V) in either December 1177 or January 1178, and he became a potential heir to the Jerusalemite throne.

In the mid-1170s Raymond of Tripoli also supported William of Tyre’s career, overseeing his appointment as royal chancellor and then as archbishop of Tyre, and in part this may explain the broadly positive account of Raymond’s career in William’s chronicle. It was from this privileged position, at the centre of the Latin kingdom’s political and ecclesiastical hierarchies, that William observed and recorded Outremer’s history.

Baldwin IV’s early reign

In the summer of 1176 Baldwin IV reached his majority and Count Raymond’s regency came to an end. The young monarch threw himself into the business of kingship despite the gradual downgrading of his leprosy, and immediately made his mark. Overturning Raymond’s policy of diplomatic rapprochement, Baldwin refused to renew the truce with Damascus and in early August led a raiding party into Lebanon’s Biqa valley, defeating Turan-Shah in a minor engagement. This shift in policy towards Islam was accompanied by a decline in influence for the count of Tripoli and, during the remainder of the decade, Baldwin tended to look elsewhere for guidance and support. Now returned to court, his mother Agnes of Courtenay seems to have established a close relationship with her once estranged son. She certainly became a significant influence in his life and before long her brother Joscelin III was appointed as royal seneschal, the highest governmental office in the realm, with purview of the treasury and regal property. After long years in Muslim captivity, Joscelin had just been released by Gumushtegin of Aleppo as part of a deal to secure support from Frankish Antioch.

This same pact brought liberty for another noble destined to shape Jerusalem’s history, Reynald of Châtillon. He had been captured by Nur al-Din in 1161, when prince of Antioch, but much had changed during fifteen years of incarceration. The death of his wife Constance and the accession of his stepson Bohemond III in 1163 deprived Reynald of rule over the Syrian principality, but, at the same time, the wedding of his stepdaughter Maria of Antioch to the Byzantine emperor lent him an aura of prestige. He thus emerged from prison as a well-connected, battle-hardened veteran, albeit one who technically was landless. This anomaly was soon resolved by Reynald’s marriage, blessed by King Baldwin, to Stephanie of Milly, the lady of Transjordan, which brought him lordship of Kerak and Montreal and a position on the front line in the struggle with Saladin.

As a Syrian prince, Reynald had a reputation for untamed violence, garnered from his attack on Greek-held Cyprus and his infamous attempts, around 1154, to extort money from the Latin patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges. The unfortunate prelate was beaten, dragged to the citadel and forced to sit through an entire day beneath the blazing summer sun, with his bare skin smeared in honey to attract swarms of worrisome insects. In the late 1170s, however, Reynald became one of Baldwin’s most trusted allies, furnishing him with able support in the fields of war, diplomacy and politics.

With Egypt and Damascus united under Saladin and Baldwin IV’s health faltering, the Palestinian Franks made repeated but ultimately fruitless attempts to secure foreign aid. During the winter of 1176 to 1177 Reynald of Châtillon was sent as a royal envoy to Constantinople to negotiate a renewed alliance with the Greek Emperor Manuel Comnenus. In September 1176 the Byzantines had been roundly defeated at the Battle of Myriokephalon (in western Asia Minor) by the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, Kilij Arslan II (who had succeeded Ma‘sud in 1156). In terms of manpower and territory, the losses inflicted upon the Greeks as a result of this reversal were relatively limited. But severe damage was done to Byzantine prestige in both Europe and the Levant, and Manuel spent much of the remainder of the decade retrenching his position. In the hope of reasserting Greek influence on the international stage, the emperor agreed to Reynald of Châtillon’s overture, promising to provide naval support for a new allied offensive against Ayyubid Egypt. In return, the Latin kingdom was to accept subject status as a Byzantine protectorate and an Orthodox Christian patriarch restored to power in Jerusalem.

For a time, it seemed as if this venture might bear fruit. In late summer 1177 a Greek fleet duly arrived at Acre, and this coincided with the advent in the Levant of Count Philip of Flanders, son of the committed crusader Thierry of Flanders, at the head of a large military contingent. Philip had taken the cross in 1175 in response to the ever more frequent and vocal appeals from the Latins of Outremer for new western European crusades to the Holy Land. Yet despite his good intentions, Philip’s expedition proved to be a fiasco. With final preparations afoot for an assault on Egypt, petty arguments broke out over who should have rights to the Nile region should it fall and, amid mutual recriminations, the projected campaign collapsed. Disgruntled and alienated, the Byzantine navy set sail for Constantinople. In September 1177 Count Philip joined forces with Raymond III of Tripoli, and together they spent the winter trying and failing to capture first Hama and then Harim. A real chance to disrupt, perhaps even to overrun, Saladin’s position in Egypt had been squandered. Having amassed a defensive force to counter the expected Christian invasion, the sultan suddenly found that he was no longer under threat.

CONFRONTATION

In late autumn 1177 Saladin initiated his first significant military campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem since Nur al-Din’s death. Despite the importance of this expedition–the sultan’s opening salvo in his self-appointed role as Islam’s new
jihadi
champion–his precise motives and objectives are somewhat opaque. In all probability the 1177 offensive was not planned as a full-scale invasion of Palestine, targeting the reconquest of Jerusalem, but was instead an opportunistic raid. With his armies already assembled to defend against an expected attack, Saladin seized the chance to make a practical affirmation of his commitment to the holy war, seeking to assert his own martial dominance over the Franks, while providing a counterweight to their northern Syrian attack.

Saladin marched out of Egypt at the head of more than 20,000 horsemen, setting up a forward command post at the frontier settlement of al-Arish. Leaving behind his heavy baggage, he moved north into Palestine, reaching Ascalon around 22 November. There he found an alarmed Baldwin IV. With much of his realm’s fighting manpower absent in the north alongside Philip of Flanders and Raymond III, the king had hurriedly mustered what troops he could at the coast. As one eastern Christian contemporary put it, ‘everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin’. Baldwin was joined by Reynald of Châtillon, his seneschal, Joscelin of Courtenay, a force of some 600 knights and a few thousand infantry, and the bishop of Bethlehem carrying the True Cross. This army made a brief show of confronting the Muslim advance, but, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Franks soon withdrew behind the walls of Ascalon, leaving Saladin free to strike inland towards Judea.
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