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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵ 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.