Baldwin IV

Also known as the Leper King

William of Tyre discovered the condition by accident. Tutoring the young prince and his playmates in the royal palace, the chronicler noticed that the nine-year-old Baldwin felt nothing when the other boys scratched his arms in play. “It is impossible to refrain from tears while speaking of this great misfortune,” William wrote later. “Baldwin… endured it altogether too patiently, as if he felt nothing.” When his father Amalric I died in 1174, the thirteen-year-old leper inherited a kingdom already watching for Saladin. Because he could not marry or sire an heir, his whole reign was dominated by the search for husbands for his sisters Sibylla and Isabella — a question that would outlive him and, in the end, destroy his kingdom.

In November 1177, aged sixteen and already losing feeling in his hands, Baldwin rode out of Ascalon with roughly five hundred knights and the relic of the True Cross, and fell on a vastly larger Ayyubid army at Montgisard. The rout was so complete that Saladin himself reportedly escaped only on a pack-camel. Both Christian and Muslim chroniclers credited the victory to the king's personal courage — a miracle attributed to a teenage leper. The rest of his reign was consumed by faction: the Court Party around his mother Agnes of Courtenay and her protégé Guy of Lusignan clawed against the Noble Party of Raymond III of Tripoli and the Ibelins for control of the regency as the king's body failed around him.

By 1183 he had lost his sight and could no longer ride, yet when Saladin besieged the great castle of Kerak he had himself carried east on a litter to lift the siege — and did. He died in the spring of 1185, aged twenty-four, and was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre beside the founding kings. Within two years Guy of Lusignan had led the kingdom's army into the waterless trap at the Horns of Hattin; within three months of that, Jerusalem itself had surrendered to Saladin. Historians still regard Baldwin as the monarch who held a fracturing state together through sheer force of character — and his death, not Hattin, as the moment the last brake against Saladin was released.

Preceded by Amalric I. Succeeded by Baldwin V.

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