Come along with me, dear readers, because today we are going to answer, with precision and accuracy, the question that half the internet asks Google every single day: who on earth reigned in Jerusalem after the early — though long foreseeable — death of Baldwin IV, the famous Leper King of the silver mask?
And let me warn you right away that the answer is not, as many believe after watching Ridley Scott's pretty film, that show-off Guy de Lusignan, nor his wife Sibylla, nor Balian of Ibelin, nor the sultan Saladin — I can see you coming with those answers already, you bunch of smart-alecks.
The correct answer is: a child. And not just any child, but a boy of only eight who never chose anything, who never won or lost a single battle, who probably never quite understood what that heavy, cold ring of gilded metal they kept placing on his head actually was. A boy whom History knows as Baldwin V of Jerusalem and whom his contemporaries called, with a tenderness that chills the blood once you know how all this ends, Baudouinet: little Baldwin.
He reigned on his own for little more than a year. He died in Acre in the summer of 1186, having just turned nine. And his small corpse, my friends, was the spark that lit the most preposterous coup d'état of the entire Middle Ages, with movie-worthy scenes such as the keys of a strongbox hurled out of a window, a holy city completely sealed off and guarded by the Templars, a beautiful queen who fooled (and screwed) an entire kingdom with a trick worthy of a three-card monte hustler, and a Grand Master of the Temple driven by an old romantic grudge straight out of a cheap novel.
And barely one year after his death, Jerusalem and the whole Christian kingdom had fallen forever into Islamic hands (well, "forever and ever" not technically — Emperor Frederick II would recover the city on a fifteen-year rental contract in 1229, but don't spoil my drama, we're in 1186 here).
Do you want me to tell you how a kingdom gets destroyed in less than twenty-four months? Then follow me, off we go; I promise you the story is real and not a single bit of it is wasted.
An Orphan Before He Was Born
To understand little Baldwin you have to go back to 1176, when the kingdom of Jerusalem had a very simple mathematical problem — Dynasty 101, so to speak: its king, Baldwin IV, had been a leper since the age of nine. And a leper whose body and schwanzstucker were already half destroyed by the disease neither marries nor can father heirs. All the more so in the twelfth century, when it was believed that all of it, the leprosy, was divine punishment. I'd like to see which medieval lass would cheerfully agree to climb into bed with that poor king who looked like something the cat dragged in, covered in scabs in full active phase... Everyone knew the reins of the throne would sooner or later pass to his elder sister, the beautiful Sibylla, so marrying her off to someone of real standing was urgent business.
And boy, did they find themselves a first-class gallant. His name was William of Montferrat, nicknamed Longsword, because he was handsome and presumably carried some kind of very long secret weapon hidden in his trousers. W. of M. was probably the most sought-after bachelor ever to set foot in the Holy Land: son of a powerful marquis of northern Italy, first cousin of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany — of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, no less — and cousin of the king of France too. The kind of son-in-law your own mother-in-law, once her daughter had told her about the long sword and the many millions he had on his hands, would frame on the wall and pamper non-stop, cooking him lasagna, coffee with brandy and his favorite dessert, tiramisù, every single Sunday.
And not like what happens to you and me, when every Sunday the mother-in-law serves us dog kibble to eat, potassium cyanide to drink and one of those hospital-grade Danone yogurts...
The great man with the long sword arrived in the Levant (that is, the Middle East) in October 1176, married the passionate princess Sibylla almost before unpacking his bags, and by June 1177 he was already dead. Malaria, in Ascalon, they said. Poison, on a plate, I suspect. The wedding of the century didn't last a year.
But he left something behind: Sibylla was pregnant. And at the end of that same year, 1177, a boy was born who would never know his father. They named him Baldwin, after the leper uncle. An orphan before he was born, heir to the throne before he could speak and — this is the truly cruel part — a political weapon before he could walk.
Because in Jerusalem, my dear friends, a baby with royal blood was not just a simple baby. He was one more piece on the political chessboard; and the most important one at that: the King. And obviously everyone wanted to control it and move it at will.
The Crown Used as a Blunt Weapon
Sibylla, a young and beautiful widow, heiress to an entire kingdom, was back on Tind... errr... I mean back on the marriage market, and you can imagine the line of suitors, wrapping twice around the city walls. In 1180 she finally married — for love this time, the chronicles say, and that alone should have set off every alarm bell in the kingdom, because a queen must marry the most capable warrior or the shrewdest politician, not the prettiest one. — Sibylla's chosen one was Guy de Lusignan, a French knight freshly landed in the Holy Land from the region of Poitou, France: tall, handsome and charming, friendly, well-mannered and blessed with magnificent hair. All of it mounted on top of a head factory-equipped with the intelligence of a sardine, the cunning of an anchovy and the military talent of SpongeBob SquarePants.
Poor Guy, fresh off the boat from Europe, thought that governing in the Middle East — a region bloody and ultraviolent since forever, inhabited by the most cunning, most treacherous, most sons-of-bitches foxes that ever existed (such as, say, the great Muslim sultan Saladin, or the Christian Byzantine emperor Andronikos Komnenos, a real charmer of a man who strangled his own thirteen-year-old nephew to steal his throne) — would be like governing Bikini Bottom alongside Squidward and Patrick Star... Well, no.
Baldwin IV, already half dying, gave his brother-in-law a chance. And a real one: in 1183, half blind and no longer able to ride a horse, he named him regent of the kingdom, which is a bit like handing the keys of the Ferrari to that dimwit brother-in-law of yours, just to watch him wrap it around the first roundabout. Guy squandered it with astonishing efficiency: he insubordinated himself, made catastrophic political and economic decisions, and topped it all off by massacring some Arab Bedouins who were under royal protection and who — small detail — worked as spies for the kingdom of Jerusalem against its greatest enemy at the time: the Egypt ruled by Saladin. In other words: the man singlehandedly wiped out his own foreign intelligence service, whose information was vital for knowing what the hell that scoundrel of a sultan was plotting over in Cairo. A true prodigy, our man Guy, bloody hell.
The Leper King, who might have been rotting on the outside but still kept the sharpest, most lucid head in the entire Latin East, then made a brutal decision: by royal edict he disinherited Guy outright. And so that not even the shadow of a doubt remained that his useless brother-in-law would never wear that crown, he did something unprecedented in the young kingdom of Jerusalem: he crowned his nephew while he himself was still alive. Which is more or less like suddenly changing your will to leave everything to a stranger, and doing it right in the middle of Christmas dinner, with the whole family gathered around... while treating yourself to the immense little pleasure of looking every one of them in the eye as you carve the turkey. If you know what I mean.
On November 20, 1183, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — that is, the place where the holy body of Jesus supposedly lies at rest — a six-year-old boy was acclaimed, crowned and anointed king of Jerusalem alongside his leper uncle. Every baron of the realm paid him homage, one by one, knee to the ground.
All but one. Guess who. Exactly: the kid's stepfather, Guy de Lusignan, who stayed shut away in his fief of Ascalon, chewing on his humiliation and plotting revenge like a man incubating a serpent's egg.
Look closely at that scene, because it is pure twelfth century: a twenty-two-year-old king literally falling to pieces, placing the crown on a six-year-old to block his own brother-in-law. That is not a succession, my friends. That is a declaration of family war with incense in the background and a Gregorian choir.
A Dying Man, a Child and the Pact of the Four Thrones
By early 1185, Baldwin IV could take no more: blind, without hands, without feet, carried on a litter from battle to battle like a living relic. He summoned the High Court around his deathbed and dictated his last wishes, which are of a chilling lucidity for a twenty-three-year-old man devoured by leprosy. At twenty-three, I couldn't even plan my week, or keep a girlfriend for longer than a week.
First: the regent of the kingdom would be Raymond III, Count of Tripoli, direct descendant of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, one of the first crusaders to reach the Holy Land in 1099 — at that point the most experienced politician in the Latin East, veteran of a thousand palace intrigues and hardened by nine long years of brutal captivity in Muslim hands, which in that land amounted to holding a university master's degree in applied geopolitics.
Second — and here comes a detail that personally fascinates me: Raymond agreed to govern the kingdom, but refused personal custody of the child. Why? Because he was nobody's fool. Little Baldwin was a sickly creature, the kind any cold winter carries off. And if the boy died in his arms, on his own fief, who do you think would bear the accusation of murder? So the count essentially said: the kingdom, yes, I'll administer it; the child, I won't so much as touch him. Like those uncles who adore their nephew but never, ever volunteer to change the diaper. Physical guardianship of the little king went to his great-uncle, Count Joscelin III of Courtenay, who had no rights to the throne and therefore no apparent motive for wanting to hasten little Baldwin's final journey.
A man who fights to govern an entire kingdom, yet refuses even to see or touch the king. If that doesn't paint you a picture of the extreme distrust breathed in that court, well, nothing will.
And third, the most extraordinary pact of all: if Baldwin V died before coming of age, the succession would be decided by no one in Jerusalem. It would be decided — listen carefully — by the Pope of Rome, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, and the kings of France and England (who, for the curious among you, at the child's death were: Urban III, Frederick I Barbarossa, Philip II Augustus and Henry II Plantagenet). The four most powerful thrones of Christendom as arbiters, so that no local faction could take a swipe at the crown. On paper, a flawless institutional firewall. In practice, a true Screw-up with a capital S, because it amounted to entrusting your will to four gentlemen who lived nearly three thousand miles away, cordially hated one another, and took eight months to answer one of your letters (for in winter, when the seas were rough, it took four months of travel for them to receive your missive and another four for their reply to reach you... if it reached you at all, and the ship carrying it didn't sink or get taken by Moorish pirates).
That was the customer service of the twelfth century — one reply every eight months — so kindly stop complaining about how slowly your gas company or internet provider gets back to you.
Baldwin IV finally died, at twenty-three, in the spring of 1185 — sometime between March 16 and May 16, it is said — and I swear his story deserves its own chapter (and in fact I already gave him one: you'll find it right here, one click away on this blog). Shortly before the end, he ordered one last public ceremony for his nephew at the Holy Sepulchre, and from that day one image has come down to us that is worth more than ten chronicles: the little king was carried to the banquet on the shoulders of Balian of Ibelin — yes, the one from the movie, except the real one looked nothing like Orlando Bloom — one of the tallest and most respected barons of the realm. Partly because the boy wasn't up for long walks. And partly as a political message: even the family of the other claimant to the succession, Princess Isabella, was — literally — holding the boy king on its shoulders.
An entire kingdom riding on the shoulders of a seven-year-old. Medieval chroniclers didn't need to invent metaphors: they had them right in front of them, dressed in silk and scared to death.
The Reign That Never Was
And what did King Baldwin V do during his reign? Well, nothing. He did absolutely nothing except play carefree in the castle courtyard with his little friends, as any eight-year-old would. And this — as the father of two little creatures myself — I say with the greatest affection for him and as the highest of compliments: Baudouinet was the only ruler in History with zero mistakes on his record.
He was eight years old. He lived in Saint John of Acre, in a castle by the sea, in the care of his great-uncle Joscelin, presumably playing knights with wooden swords while half the kingdom conspired in his name. The important decisions were made by Raymond III of Tripoli, and credit where credit is due: he did it remarkably well, negotiating with Saladin a four-year truce that gave the exhausted kingdom the breather it had spent a decade begging for on its knees.
Supreme irony: the reign of the weakest king in the entire history of Jerusalem coincided with one of its most peaceful periods. Not one invasion, not one battle, not a single miserable siege. Saladin, patience personified, sharpened his scimitar while watching the calendar, because news from the Frankish court reached him punctually every week and he knew perfectly well that the whole thing was crumbling on its own, without him having to spend a single arrow.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Christian patriarch Heraclius had toured the whole of Europe in 1184 — in the company of his mistress — begging for help from court to court, going as far as offering the keys of the kingdom, the actual keys, to Philip of France and Henry of England. Do you know how many kings, princes and great lords of the West came to prop up the boy king's wobbling throne? Zero.
Well, I lie. One came: the Marquis William V of Montferrat, the paternal grandfather, an old crusader who crossed the Mediterranean with his sixty-plus years on his back to watch over his grandson's safety and rights. The only one who showed up wasn't coming for the crown: he was coming for the boy. Keep this old man in your memory, for at the ferocious battle of the Horns of Hattin we shall meet him again — helmet on his head, shield and sword in hand, ready to do his soldier's duty one last time.
Acre, August 1186: Little Baldwin Dies
And then, one day, at the height of the summer of 1186, in Acre, the little king died.
Just like that. The chronicles of witnesses and historians give us no exact cause: they only tell us he had always been a frail, sickly child, of health so precarious that his death, rather than feared, was simply expected. He was nine years old, or perhaps still eight. He had been king his entire short life and had never truly reigned a single day.
Was he poisoned? Could he have been the victim of some perverse palace conspiracy, or of the dreaded sect of the Assassins, already active by then? Ah, my friends, I knew you would ask, because I asked myself exactly the same thing. An English chronicler, a certain William of Newburgh, wrote that Raymond III of Tripoli had poisoned him to take the throne. Sounds fantastic, I admit: pure Game of Thrones. It only has three problems that don't add up: 1) Newburgh was writing from England, two and a half thousand miles from the events, without ever having set foot in the Holy Land in his goddamn life — which is the medieval equivalent of judging a person or an entire country from the comments you read on X, Insta, TikTok or Facebook; 2) for personal reasons of his own, he already loathed Count Raymond beforehand; and 3) the boy was not in Raymond's custody but in Joscelin's — a trusted man of the rival faction. In other words: if anyone had access to the child's plate or cup to slip in poison, it was precisely the side that stood to gain most from his death, and not Raymond. Modern historians are more or less clear on this: he died of what so many medieval children died of, even the ones who slept in palaces. Of the lack of hygiene and medical knowledge, the lack of effective medicine, and of being an already sickly child in the twelfth century.
The Templars escorted the small coffin from Acre to Jerusalem and buried him in the Holy Sepulchre, next to Jesus Christ and the kings who preceded him. His mother, Sibylla, commissioned a splendid tomb for him, sculpted by the finest workshops of the kingdom, which survived six hundred years... until a great fire destroyed it in 1808. Today only a few old drawings and scattered fragments of it remain. They didn't even leave the poor kid his tomb.
And with the boy dead, the pact of the four thrones — Pope, Emperor, France, England — immediately came into force, right? The great powers of Christendom would calmly and solemnly decide the succession, right? — Well, no. Not a chance in hell!
The Coup: One Funeral, Two Keys and a Con Man's Trick
What happened in September 1186 is so novelistic that if I wrote it exactly as it occurred in one of my novels, you would accuse me of exaggerating and slap a two-star review on my Amazon page.
While little Baldwin's body was traveling toward Jerusalem, the two rival factions moved their pieces at the same time. Raymond of Tripoli summoned the barons of the realm to Nablus, fief of the Ibelins, to decide the succession according to the pact, with its minutes, its oaths and all the paperwork. Nearly all the high nobility attended. A textbook blunder, because as it happens, while the barons were deliberating in Nablus, Sibylla was at her son's funeral. In Jerusalem. With her husband Guy. With the patriarch Heraclius, a holy man who kept — in the most extreme luxury — a lady of negotiable virtue as his official mistress, whom the common folk slyly called «the Patriarchess». With Raynald of Châtillon, the kingdom's official psychopath and killer. With the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard de Ridefort. And with the troops of her uncle Joscelin, which had already seized Acre and Beirut «to guarantee order», which is what these things have always been called since the world began.
The barons gathered in Nablus had the law, the codes and every legal argument on their side. But Sibylla already held in her hands the entire city, the swords to defend it, and the still-warm corpse of her son the king. Guess which weighed more.
But one last obstacle remained: the crowns of the kingdom were kept in a chest locked with three separate keys — the strongbox I mentioned at the beginning — distributed among the patriarch and the masters of the Temple and the Hospital, precisely so that nobody would take it into his head to crown himself on some random Friday afternoon. Patriarch Heraclius was already in on the plot. The Templar master de Ridefort too, and with what enthusiasm. But the Grand Master of the Hospital, Roger de Moulins, a man of integrity, faithful to the letter of the law and an ally of the barons, flatly refused to hand over his.
They insisted, they pressured him, they hounded him for hours. And good Roger, fed up and exasperated, ended up hurling his key away — some say out of a window — so as not to dirty his hands by surrendering it to the conspirators. Picture the scene: the plotters scurrying around the garden of the courtyard below, sleeves rolled up, hunting through the bushes for the tiny little key that opened the box with the crown of Jerusalem. The geopolitics of the most sacred kingdom on Earth, scrapping on all fours in the dirt. And in the end, they found it.
The coronation was held at the Holy Sepulchre, with the gates of Jerusalem shut tight and guarded by Templars so that no baron from Nablus could come and spoil the party, and — a detail that scandalized the chroniclers of the age — on a Friday, a fasting day, so that only fasting food could be served at the royal banquet. They couldn't even pull off a coup d'état with decent catering: they usurped a throne on lentils and salted fish.
But pay attention now, because here comes the queen's masterstroke. Sibylla's own supporters detested Guy and distrusted him — why, even his allies saw him coming and knew he would ruin them — so they set her one condition: we crown you, yes, but you annul your marriage. Sibylla accepted the deal, but with three seemingly innocent conditions: that her daughters by Guy be considered legitimate, that Guy keep all his fiefs and possessions... and that she be free to choose her next husband.
Everyone signed, delighted. And nobody read between the lines of that last innocent little request.
Patriarch Heraclius crowned her queen. Then he handed her the second crown and invited her to designate a new consort ipso facto. And Sibylla, before the entire kingdom and with the best poker face of the whole Middle Ages, called out the name of Guy de Lusignan, her freshly repudiated husband, and placed the crown on his head with her own hands.
Checkmate, everyone. They had demanded she divorce and had guaranteed her free choice of husband: she chose the same one. Legally unimpeachable, morally scandalous, politically suicidal. You may hate her, but grant her this: in a kingdom of warriors with five-foot swords, the boldest move of 1186 was made by a woman armed with nothing but two crowns and a smile.
In Nablus, the barons attempted a counter-coup by crowning the other heiress, Isabella, with her husband Humphrey of Toron. But Humphrey, a frightened young man for whom the prospect of civil war was as oversized as the surname he carried, fled Nablus by night — practically jumping out of a window — rode to Jerusalem and swore fealty to Sibylla and Guy. The counter-coup died of secondhand embarrassment before it was even born. Raymond III went back home to his Tripoli spitting bile all the way, and the kingdom was left in the hands of Guy de Lusignan: the man a dying leper king had spent his last strength trying to keep off the throne.
The Grudge That Was Worth a Crown
And now let me introduce you to the character who serves as the hinge of this entire tragedy, because without him perhaps none of it would have worked: Gerard de Ridefort, Grand Master of the Temple and holder of a doctorate cum laude in grudge-keeping.
Years earlier, when Ridefort was still a Flemish knight in the service of Raymond III of Tripoli, the count had promised him the hand of a rich heiress: the lady of Botrun. But when the lady became available, Raymond married her to someone else: a Pisan merchant named Plivano who, according to the tradition preserved in the chronicles, literally put the bride's weight in gold on a scale. A noble heiress sold by the pound, like tuna at the fish market. And Ridefort, a ruined knight who despised merchants with all his feudal soul, never forgave it.
Spurned, he hung up all his matrimonial hopes and joined the Templar Order — where, all things considered, the vow of chastity came factory-installed for him — climbed every rung until he became Grand Master in 1185, and when in 1186 he held in his hand the keys to Sibylla's coup d'état, the literal ones and the figurative ones, he used every last one of them against that bastard Raymond of Tripoli. Tradition has it that, watching Guy being crowned, the Templar savored his revenge by declaring that "this crown was well worth the marriage to Madame de Botrun that the Count of Tripoli had stolen from him." It reminds me a little of Henry IV of Navarre when, in order to be crowned king of France in the cathedral of Chartres in 1594, he converted to Catholicism and uttered the famous words: "Paris is well worth a Mass..."
We don't know whether Ridefort's line is literal or was put in his mouth by a talented chronicler. But it doesn't matter: it sums up the catastrophe better than any treatise. The fate of the kingdom of Jerusalem was gambled away, in part, over the romantic spite of a knight humiliated years before. Save this scene for the next time someone tells you that History is driven by great ideas.
And Then, the Abyss
What came next you already know — and if you don't, I'll summarize it for you with a heavy heart.
Guy, now king, governed exactly as everyone feared. In May 1187, the same Ridefort forced a suicidal charge of 140 Templar and Hospitaller knights against thousands of Saladin's horsemen at the springs of Cresson, because the Grand Master was even worse at mathematics than at love: total massacre — and among the dead, cruel irony, was Roger de Moulins, the honest man of the keys. Two months later, on July 4, 1187, Guy himself led the entire army of the kingdom to die of thirst and arrows at the Horns of Hattin, in good part for following — once again — Ridefort's harebrained advice. There the king was taken prisoner, there fell the relic of the True Cross, and there fell fighting, by the way, old William of Montferrat, the grandfather who had crossed the sea for his dead grandson. I told you to keep him in your memory.
And on October 2, 1187, Saladin finally entered Jerusalem.
From little Baldwin's coronation in 1183 to the loss of the Holy City: four years. From his death in Acre to the catastrophe: just fourteen months. There are yogurts that last longer than that kingdom lasted without its boy.
And one last note before my theory, because History pulls off billiard shots no novelist would dare to sign. Of the two religious orders that gambled the kingdom with those three keys, the Templar order of the resentful Ridefort ended its road one hundred and twenty years later, annihilated by a king of France on a Friday the 13th — amid torture, pyres, tears, blood and confessions extracted with red-hot pincers. The order of Roger de Moulins, on the other hand — the honest man who threw his key out the window — outlived everything and everyone: once expelled from Jerusalem, the Hospitaller knights withdrew first to Acre — yes, the very city where little Baldwin died — and from there moved on to Cyprus, to Rhodes, to Messina and finally to Malta, where in 1565 they stopped the entire Ottoman empire of Suleiman the Magnificent dead in its tracks, in the most savage siege of the sixteenth century. Today you know them as the Knights of Malta; they are headquartered in Rome and they are the only military order of the Crusades still alive, nine centuries later. Destiny, it seems, knows how to choose: of the coup-plotters, not even the dust remains; of the man who threw the key out the window, everything.
My Theory, Dear Readers
And here comes my final reflection, the one that has been circling my head ever since I began studying this child whom History dispatches in two lines.
All the spotlight goes to Baldwin IV, the Leper King, and rightly so: few figures of the Middle Ages can stand the comparison. But I propose you take a moment to look at the nephew. Because Baldwin V is something more uncomfortable than a hero: he is a mirror. A kingdom that crowns a six-year-old is not choosing a king: it is confessing that it no longer trusts any of its adults. The pact of the four thrones was not prudence: it was the last will and testament of a ruling class that knew itself incapable of not devouring itself the moment the leper closed his eyes.
And I am convinced Saladin understood this better than anyone. He did not attack during the child's reign. He didn't need to. He signed his truce, sat down, and let the Franks do his work for him by destroying themselves: Nablus against Jerusalem, the key out the window, the con man's crown, Ridefort's grudge against Raymond and the lady of Botrun. And when at the battle of the Horns of Hattin Saladin finally drew his sword for real, in 1187, he did not defeat a kingdom: he simply picked up its rubble.
Little Baldwin did not lose Jerusalem. It was lost by all those who fought over holding up his crown, starting the very afternoon of his funeral, with the little one's body still warm in the Holy Sepulchre. And perhaps that is the true epitaph of this boy king whom nobody ever asked anything: he was not the last king of crusader Jerusalem, but he was the last innocent king it ever had.
See you in the next article, dear readers. And you know how it goes: sometimes History is written not by the victors, but by those who hunt for small lost keys in the undergrowth.