Baldwin I

Also known as first King of Jerusalem

When Godfrey of Bouillon died childless on 18 July 1100, his Lotharingian retainers barricaded themselves into the Tower of David to stop the Patriarch Daimbert from turning the new conquest into a theocracy, and sent north to summon Baldwin from Edessa. Unlike his brother — who had refused a crown of gold in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns — Baldwin had no qualms about the royal title. He was crowned the first King of Jerusalem on Christmas Day 1100, deliberately in Bethlehem rather than in Jerusalem itself, a discreet concession to that same scruple even as he cheerfully swept it aside.

Over the next eighteen years he welded a string of coastal conquests — Arsuf and Caesarea (1101), Acre (1104), Beirut (1110), Sidon (1111) — into an economic engine. The ports brought pilgrims, Italian naval squadrons, and the silver that paid his knights. In 1115 he pushed the kingdom's border south as far as the Gulf of Aqaba and planted the great fortress of Montreal (Krak de Montréal) directly across the Cairo–Damascus caravan road. His chaplain Fulcher of Chartres compared him to “a second Joshua”; his critics noted, less kindly, that he had married the Armenian princess Arda for alliance, then set her aside, then married Adelaide del Vasto of Sicily for her famous dowry, and set her aside too once the money was safely in the treasury.

He died in April 1118 on another raid into Egypt, fishing at the mouth of a Nile distributary when he was suddenly taken ill. His household, determined he should be buried beside his brother in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, packed his body in salt and spices and carried him back across the Sinai. The shallow lagoon on the northern Sinai coast where he fell ill still bears his Arabised name — Bārdawīl, Baldwin's lake. Modern scholars consider him the real founder of the kingdom: the pragmatist who turned a garrison of pious enthusiasts into a working state, literate and shrewd enough to outlast its founders.

Preceded by Godfrey of Bouillon. Succeeded by Baldwin II.

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