Amalric I

Also known as the clerkly king

Younger brother of Baldwin III, Amalric inherited the throne in February 1163. The High Court made his coronation conditional on the annulment of his marriage to Agnes of Courtenay — officially on grounds of consanguinity, in practice because her Edessan family was politically toxic in Jerusalem — though the children Baldwin and Sibylla were declared legitimate and retained full claim to the succession. He complied, and was crowned alone.

His reign became a single strategic obsession: Egypt. Five times between 1163 and 1169 he marched an army into the Nile Delta, trying to seize control of the decaying Fatimid caliphate before Nur ad-Din's lieutenants could. Briefly, in 1169, he had Fatimid viziers paying him tribute and coordinated operations with the Byzantine fleet. But the expeditions unseated the old order and pushed its successor — a Kurdish general named Saladin — into the role of sultan of a united Egypt. Amalric's grand strategy, brilliant on paper, created exactly the enemy the kingdom had most feared. He also carried out the sharpest centralising reform of the twelfth century, the Assise sur la ligece, which forced every rear-vassal of every lord to swear fealty directly to the crown.

William of Tyre, who served as his chancellor and tutored his son, described him as a clerkly and studious king — slightly aloof, very well-read, a patient administrator rather than a popular figure. He was struck down by dysentery on returning from a minor raid in 1174 and died in Jerusalem at the age of thirty-eight, leaving the throne to a thirteen-year-old leper.

Preceded by Baldwin III. Succeeded by Baldwin IV.

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