Jerusalem: The Biography

It is hard to find a case of nobler courage and grace under fire than this doomed young king who was closely watched by his devoted tutor: ‘Day by day, his condition became worse, the extremities of his face were especially attacked so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him.’ He had been brought up apart from his mother but now the louche Agnes returned to support her son, always accompanying him on campaign. She unwisely placed the king in the hands of an arrogant minister who served as seneschal. When he was assassinated in Acre, Jerusalem politics began to assume the menace of a Mafia family in decline.

The king’s cousin Count Raymond III of Tripoli demanded the regency and restored stability, appointing the royal tutor, William, as chancellor. But the strategic nightmare that had always haunted Jerusalem now materialized: Saladin, strongman of Cairo, seized Damascus, gradually but steadily uniting Syria, Egypt, Yemen and much of Iraq into one powerful sultanate, encircling Jerusalem. Raymond of Tripoli, one of those urbane Levantine dynasts who spoke Arabic, bought time by agreeing a truce with Saladin. But it bought time for Saladin too.

Baldwin showed his mettle by raiding up into Syria and Lebanon, but during his frequent illnesses the magnates feuded around the sickbed. The Master of the Templars was increasingly insubordinate, while the Hospitallers were waging a private war against the patriarch, even firing arrows inside the Sepulchre. Meanwhile a new arrival, the veteran knight Reynald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak and Outrejourdain, across the Jordan, was both asset and liability, radiating aggressive confidence and reckless swagger.

Saladin started to probe the kingdom, attacking Ashkelon and riding towards Jerusalem, whose citizens panicked and fled into the Tower of David. Ashkelon was about to fall when in late November 1177 the leper-king, Reynald and a few hundred knights attacked Saladin’s 26,000 troops at Montgisard, north-west of Jerusalem. Inspired by the presence of the True Cross and sightings of St George on the battlefield, Baldwin won a famous victory.

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: VICTORY OF THE LEPER-KING

The leper-king returned in triumph while Saladin only just escaped on a camel. But the sultan was still master of Egypt and Syria, and he soon raised new armies.

In 1179, during a raid into Saladin’s Syria, Baldwin was ambushed, his horse bolted and he escaped thanks only to the courage of the old Constable of the Kingdom who gave his life to save the boy. Recovering with characteristic pluck, he again led his forces against Saladin’s raiders. Close to the Litani river, he was unhorsed and horribly exposed: his spreading paralysis prevented him mounting again. A knight had to carry him off the battlefield on his back. The young king could never marry – it was thought that leprosy could be passed sexually and now he could scarcely lead his armies. He expressed his personal distress – and the need for a strong new king from Europe – to Louis VII of France: ‘To be deprived of the use of one’s limbs is little help to one in carrying out the work of government. If only I could be cured of the disease of Naaman but I have found no Elisha to heal me. It’s not fitting that a hand so weak should hold power when Arab aggression presses upon the Holy City.’ The sicker the king, the hotter the fight for power. The king’s decline matched the political and moral rot. When Count Raymond of Tripoli and Prince Bohemond of Antioch rode towards the city with a cavalry squadron, the king angrily suspected a coup d’état, again buying time with a truce with Saladin.

When the patriarch died, the queen mother Agnes passed over William, Archbishop of Tyre, and appointed Heraclius of Caesarea, said to be her lover. Favouring rich silks, glittering with jewellery and wafting on a cloud of expensive scent, this ecclesiastical gigolo kept a Nablusite draper’s wife, Paschia de Riveri, as his mistress. She now moved to Jerusalem, and even bore him a daughter: Jerusalemites called her Madame la Patriarchesse.

The King would soon die. Agnes had to settle the succession.

GUY: FLAWED HEIR

Agnes therefore arranged a marriage between the king’s sister-heiress Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan, the attractive twenty-seven-year-old brother of her latest lover, the Constable of the Kingdom. Princess Sibylla, a young widow who had a son by her first marriage, was the only person who was delighted with the match. To most of the barons, her new husband seemed neither experienced nor high born enough to handle Jerusalem’s existential crisis. Guy, now Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was a well-born Poitevin baron, but he certainly lacked authority. He divided the kingdom just as it most needed to be united.