Download PDF | Bernard Hamilton - The Leper King and His Heirs_ Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem-Cambridge University Press (2000).
315 Pages
The reign of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem (1174-85) has traditionally been seen as a period of decline when, because of the king’s illness, power came to be held by unsuitable men who made the wrong policy decisions. Notably, they ignored the advice of Raymond of Tripoli and attacked Saladin, who was prepared to keep peace with the Franks while uniting the Islamic Near East under his rule.
This book challenges that view, arguing that peace with Saladin was not a viable option for the Franks; that the young king, despite suffermg from lepromatous leprosy (the most deadly form of the disease), was an excellent battle leader who strove with some success to frustrate Saladin’s imperial ambitions; that Baldwin had to remain king in order to hold factions in check; but that the society over which he presided was, contrary to what is often said, vigorous and self-confident.
BERNARD HAMILTON is Emeritus Professor of Crusading History, University of Nottingham.
Acknowledgements
This book has grown out of a lecture that I was invited to give to the University of Edinburgh in 1982 as part of the Antiquary Visiting Scholars Programme of the Denys Hay Seminar, so my thanks are in the first instance due to the sponsors and to Dr Gary Dickson who arranged the programme. I have subsequently benefited from discussing different aspects of this subject at the Crusades Seminars convened by Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith and Dr Jonathan Phillips at the Institute of Historical Research in London; at seminars of the University of Oxford Crusades Special Subject organised by Dr Paul Hyams and Dr Miri Rubin; at a public lecture in the University of Leicester, arranged by Professor Norman Housley; and at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in 1995 with the encouragement of Dr A.V. Murray. The opportunity to read papers connected with this book at two international conferences of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (SSCLE) has been particularly valuable.
Indeed, membership of the SSCLE has aided my work on this book in all kinds of ways. I am indebted to the published work and helpful comments of a wide range of fellow members and I should particularly like to thank Professor Malcolm Barber, Dr Peter Edbury, Professor Jaroslav Folda, Dr Rudolph Hiestand, Professor Robert Huygens, Professor Ben Kedar, Professor Hans Mayer, Dr Denys Pringle, Professor Jean Richard and Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith. Four friends have to be thanked posthumously: Joshua Prawer, R.C. Smail, Ruth Morgan and Rosalind Hill, who to the very end of her long and active life was always happy to discuss with me the problems arising from my work.
I owe a special debt to my pupils who, between the inception of this work and my retirement in 1997, helped me to formulate my ideas more precisely. Any inaccuracies which remain in this text, despite the best endeavours of my friends and colleagues, are, of course, entirely my responsibility.
In writing this book I have made use chiefly of the following libraries, to the staff of which I should like to extend my thanks: the Library of the University of Nottingham; the British Library; the Libraries of the School of Oriental and African Studies, of the Warburg Institute and of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. My special thanks are due to the librarian and staff of the London Library without whose resources it would have been difficult to complete this work.
I am particularly grateful to Dr Piers Mitchell, an expert in the history of medicine and particularly in the history of leprosy, who has made time in an unusually busy life to write an article about the nature of Baldwin IV’s illness, published as an appendix to this book. This study has benefited greatly from his evaluation of the medical evidence, which I am not competent to handle.
Finally, I should like to thank William Davies and the staff of the Cambridge University Press for their encouragement, courtesy and practical help.
King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem has, for many years, been part of my family life. My children spent their adolescence to the sounds of early drafts of this work being torn up. To them, and to my wife, who has shared her marriage for the past seventeen years with the court of crusader Jerusalem, this book is affectionately dedicated.
Prologue
On 15 May 1174 Nur ad-Din, the greatest ruler of western Islam, died at Damascus leaving an eleven-year-old heir, and his dominions were torn by faction as his kinsmen and generals fought for control. Two months later, on 11 July, King Amalric of Jerusalem died of dysentery at the age of thirty-eight. He was succeeded by his thirteen-year-old son, who was crowned king as Baldwin IV four days later. Although Baldwin suffered from leprosy, he remained king until his death in 1185, during which time Saladin, ruler of Egypt, made himself master of all Nur ad-Din’s former territories until he ruled an empire stretching from the frontier of Libya to northern Iraq. It was like a giant Islamic nutcracker pivoted round the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1187 Saladin sprang the mechanism: he invaded Galilee, defeated the Franks at Hattin on 4 July and the first Crusader Kingdom came to an end.
The classic description of the internal history of the Latin
Kingdom 1174—87 is that of Sir Steven Runciman: Now two definite parties arose, the one composed of the native barons and the Hospitallers, following the leadership of Count Raymond [of Tripoli], seeking an understanding with their foreign neighbours, and unwilling to embark on risky adventures; the other composed of newcomers from the West and the Templars. This party was aggressive and militantly Christian; and it found its leaders in 1175 when at last Reynald of Chatillon was released from his Moslem prison, together with Joscelin of Edessa, a Count without a county whom fate had turned into an adventurer.!
This colourful story gathers momentum as the leper king’s reign continues and fresh actors line up on either side. On the ‘good’ side, that of Raymond of Tripoli, are the historian, William archbishop of Tyre, chancellor of the Kingdom, and the Ibelin brothers, Baldwin, who aspired to marry the leper king’s sister and heiress, Sibyl, and his brother Balian, who did marry King Amalric’s widow, the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena, and thereby become the stepfather of the leper king’s half-sister Isabel. On the ‘bad’ side the cast is led by Agnes of Courtenay, King Amalric’s first wife, whose marriage had been annulled in 1163, but who was the leper king’s mother and became very powerful during his reign.
She is held responsible for two decisions that had a baneful effect on the future of the kingdom: first, she persuaded her daughter Sibyl, the heir to the throne, to reject the suit of Baldwin of Ibelin and to marry a handsome but useless young man from France, Guy of Lusignan; secondly, she used her influence to secure the appointment of her former lover, Heraclius, who lived in open concubinage and was poorly educated, as patriarch of Jerusalem in preference to the learned and godly William of Tyre. This group was joined in 1185 by the new, hot-headed master of the Temple, Gerard of Ridefort, an avowed enemy of the count of Tripoli. In 1186 this party seized power and excluded their more able rivals from government. The kingdom was therefore singularly ill-equipped to meet Saladin’s attack in 1187 because all the wrong people were in positions of authority. Furthermore, had Raymond of Tripoli and his friends been in office the attack would never have taken place because they knew how to keep peace with Saladin.
The first two volumes of Sir Steven’s History of the Crusades were published while I was an undergraduate. I read them with avidity, and although I now disagree with his account of the leper king’s reign, I still think that his History is one of the great literary works of English historical writing, which has inspired an interest in and enthusiasm for the crusades in a whole generation. Any book dealing with so long a span of history is bound to be in part a work of synthesis, and in his account of the events leading up to Hattin Sir Steven accepted what was then the most recent modern account, that of Marshall Baldwin, Raymond III of Tripolis and the Fall of Jerusalem, which appeared to be borne out by the contemporary chronicle sources. Sir Steven was, of course, aware when he was writing that American scholars were planning a multi-volume history of the Crusades: ‘It may seem unwise for one British pen to compete with the massed typewriters of the United States’ he commented in the preface to his first volume.? That work, the Pennsylvania History of the Crusades, began to appear in 1958, and the last chapter in the first volume was entitled “The decline and fall of Jerusalem, 1174-1189’.
It was written by Baldwin, and told exactly the same story as that found in Runciman, and this congruence of opinion in the two standard modern histories made it appear that there was unanimity among scholars about the events of the leper king’s reign.?
Baldwin did not make up the ‘two-party’ account of the fall of Jerusalem. Thomas Archer and Charles Kingsford, in their contribution to a series called The Story of the Nations in 1894, noted how by the end of Baldwin IV’s reign: ‘it would seem that there were two parties in the state; on the one side the native nobles, on the other the aliens’.t Indeed, the evidence on which this theory is based is found in the two principal narrative sources for the years 1174-87, both composed in the Holy Land, the Chronicle of William of ‘Tyre, and the Chronicle of Ernoul. I shall consider in Chapter 1 the problems which those texts present.
The traditional interpretation of the history of the Crusader States in the period 1174-87 is convincing only if the view of Saladin that has been traditional in the English-speaking world ever since Sir Walter Scott published The Talisman in 1825 is accepted as true. This represents the sultan as a man of honour, who could always be relied upon to keep his word. Scott did not invent that view, but merely repeated what the sultan’s official biographers had said about him. This view of Saladin appeared to validate the opinion of Baldwin; that Raymond of Tripoli and his supporters had been right in supposing that Saladin would honour the truces that he made with them, and that however great his power became, he would be willing to live at peace with his Christian neighbours even though they had turned Jerusalem, the third holy city of Islam, into an exclusively Christian city.
The first reappraisal of Saladin was made by Andrew Ehrenkreutz in 1972. He did not adduce much new evidence, but he brought a new critical approach to his subject, treating the contemporary lives of Saladin just as any western scholar would treat the contemporary lives of a saint, for example those of Saint Louis. I found his book refreshing, though I thought that he was overreacting to the work of his predecessors and was reluctant to concede any good qualities to Saladin.°? Then in 1982 Malcolm Lyons and David Jackson published Saladin. The Politics of the Holy War. This work is based on a wide range of new archival material and provides a serious reappraisal of Saladin and of his relations with the Franks.
Other studies made during the past twenty-five years of particular aspects of the history of the Latin Kingdom in the years leading up to Hattin have also shown that the traditional interpretation is inadequate. In 1973 Jonathan Riley-Smith drew attention to the fact that the constitutional issues involved in the appointment of a regent for Baldwin V and of a successor to him in 1186 were far more complex than the conventional interpretation allowed.® In 1978 I published a paper on Reynald of Chatillon, in which I argued that he was far from being a maverick robber baron, a view that modern scholars have derived from the Chronicle of Ernoul, but was considered a serious military threat by Islamic contemporaries.’
When Joshua Prawer’s festschrift appeared in 1983 it contained two revisionist essays about Baldwin IV’s reign and its aftermath. R.C. Smail, one of the most judicious of the older generation of English crusading historians, in “Che predicaments of Guy of Lusignan’, examined sympathetically Guy’s reasons for fighting the battle of Hattin; whereas on the evidence of the accounts given in the Old French Continuations of William of ‘Tyre, this is usually dismissed as a rash and irresponsible decision by the king and Gerard of Ridefort, who disregarded the wise advice of Raymond of Tripoli that they should not fight.
The other essay, by Benjamin Kedar, was about the Patriarch Heraclius. He has had an almost uniformly hostile press since the twelfth century because of the stories in Ernoul about his liaison with Pascha dei Rivieri, a merchant’s wife known as ‘Madame la Patriarchesse’, and about his alleged avarice at the fall of Jerusalem, when he left the city with the treasures of the Church, which he refused to spend on ransoming poor Christian captives. While not attempting to deny the patriarch’s weaknesses, Kedar wrote also of his strengths, notably his excellent education, equal to that of William of Tyre, and showed that he was not an unworthy head of the Catholic establishment in the kingdom, even though he may have been a worldly one.® In 1993 Peter Edbury published an article in which he argued that the traditional division into two factions of the powerful men in the Latin Kingdom during the years leading up to Hattin cannot be sustained.®
As these examples show, many scholars share the view that a reexamination of Baldwin IV’s reign and the events leading up to Saladin’s victory at Hattin is necessary. The most recent survey of the period, Pierre Aubé’s Baudouin IV de Férusalem. Le roi lépreux, published in 1981, runs to 500 pages, but is merely a retelling of the traditional account based on William of ‘Tyre and Ernoul. Mark Pegg wrote an interesting article in which he examined what their readiness to have a leper as king tells us about the way in which the Franks of the East perceived their own society and the king’s place within it.!° Pegg is primarily concerned with the social implications of Baldwin’s illness, but in any case Baldwin’s reign needs more sustained exploration than the best article can provide. I have written this book in an attempt to meet that need.
I have tried to examine more fully Baldwin IV’s own role in the events of his reign. Earlier writers have portrayed him as a brave warrior, but also as a man who, because of his poor health, had little power but was manipulated by court factions. My own conclusion, which the reader must judge, is that the leper king had a more dynamic role in the affairs of the Latin East.
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