The Leper King's Story No Film Would Show

Most people know him, if they know him at all, from a mask. In Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven he is a graceful, doomed figure in silver, speaking softly from behind a beautiful face-plate, dying with dignity in a cool white room. It is one of the most sympathetic portraits of a medieval king ever put on screen. It is also a mercy. The real Baldwin IV of Jerusalem lived a story the camera would not dare show you in full. He was born in 1161, the only son of King Amalric of Jerusalem, and as a boy he was taught by the great chronicler William of Tyre. It was William who first noticed something wrong. The other children would play rough games, pinching and pummelling one another, and they would yelp and pull away. Baldwin never did. When the boys dug their nails into his right arm, he simply did not react. He felt nothing. William, watching, understood with dread what a numb limb in a child could mean, and he wrote that he could scarcely hold back his tears. The diagnosis was leprosy — Hansen’s disease — and in the twelfth century it was both a death sentence and a mark of divine curse. Lepers were the untouchables of Christendom, made to carry bells and live outside the walls. And this child was heir to the most contested throne on earth. He became king at thirteen, in 1174, crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the tomb of Christ, a boy monarch whose own body had already begun to betray him.

The Horror

Leprosy does not, as the old fear held, make the flesh drop away on its own. It does something quieter and crueller. It kills the nerves. The disease attacks the body’s ability to feel, and so the sufferer stops noticing the small injuries that fill a day — a burn, a cut, a stone in the shoe, a blister that splits and turns septic. Baldwin could not feel his hands, so his hands were damaged again and again until the fingers themselves were lost. He could not feel his feet, so walking destroyed them. The nerves of his face failed, and here the disease was at its most merciless: he lost the ability to blink. The eye that cannot close cannot protect itself. It dries, ulcerates and scars, and so Baldwin slowly went blind — not from a blow, but from the simple impossibility of shutting his own eyelids. Contemporaries record that by his early twenties he could not walk unaided and could no longer use his hands at all. He had to be lifted, carried, fed. And through all of it he refused to abdicate, refused the monastery, and insisted on being carried to war on a litter and, when he could still sit a horse, strapped into the saddle. To understand why that refusal mattered, picture the court around him. A leper king who could father no heir was, to the ambitious men of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a problem to be managed and a throne to be fought over. His mother, his sister Sibylla, the great barons, the Knights Templar, the newly arrived crusader lords — all of them manoeuvred around a young man everyone assumed was already dying. Baldwin tried more than once to step back: he appointed regents to rule in his place, among them Guy of Lusignan, the husband his sister had taken. But when those regents failed or overreached, the blind, crippled king had himself carried back to the centre of power and resumed the crown himself, because he would not trust them with the survival of his people. In 1183, when the desert fortress of Kerak was besieged with a wedding feast trapped inside its walls, the dying king insisted on being carried to its relief in a litter at the head of his army. He ruled in constant pain, sightless, unable at the last even to sign his own name, and he simply would not let go while there was breath in him to reign. Which brings us to the afternoon of 25 November 1177. Saladin, the greatest general of the age, had swept into the Kingdom of Jerusalem with a huge army, so confident the boy-king was finished that he let his troops spread out to raid. Baldwin, just sixteen, gathered every knight he could — a few hundred against many thousands — carried the True Cross to the front, and threw himself at Saladin’s centre near a hill called Montgisard. The chroniclers say the leper king was in the very forefront of the charge. Saladin’s army was routed. Perhaps a tenth of it made it back to Egypt. It remains one of the most astonishing upsets in medieval military history, won by a commander who could not have gripped his own reins. He would win more battles and hold his fracturing kingdom together for another eight years, ruling through the pain, governing a court full of ambitious men who circled the throne of a king they assumed could not last. He died in the spring of 1185, blind, disfigured and unable to move, at twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Within two years of his death the kingdom he had defended so ferociously was shattered by Saladin at the Battle of Hattin, and Jerusalem itself fell. Almost everything he had bled to protect was gone in a summer.

The Modern Relic

Baldwin IV was buried, as five of Jerusalem’s kings were, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the same church where he had been crowned as a boy, built over the site Christians hold to be Christ’s tomb and the hill of the crucifixion. The medieval royal tombs of Jerusalem were destroyed in the centuries after the crusader kingdoms fell, so no marked grave of the leper king survives to stand beside. But the church does, one of the most visited holy sites on earth, and you can walk into it today in the Old City of Jerusalem. Somewhere within those worn, incense-dark stones a sixteen-year-old who could not feel his own hands was crowned, and a broken young man of twenty-three was laid to rest. Kingdom of Heaven gave him a mask so we would not have to look. The truth is that there was no mask, and he never once looked away.

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