Leper King Crowned: Baldwin IV Takes Jerusalem at 13

A boy king diagnosed with leprosy at age nine held the most embattled throne in Christendom and became one of the medieval world's most extraordinary military leaders. Baldwin IV was crowned King of Jerusalem on July 11, 1174, at just thirteen years old, after the death of his father Amalric I. The assembled nobles knew their new sovereign carried a disease that would slowly destroy his body, yet no viable alternative existed. Baldwin's leprosy was discovered years earlier by his tutor, the historian William of Tyre, who noticed the prince felt no pain when other children scratched and pinched his right arm during play. The loss of sensation in his extremities was an unmistakable early symptom. In the twelfth century, leprosy carried enormous stigma, and a leper king would have been unthinkable in most European kingdoms. But Jerusalem's precarious position between Saladin's expanding empire and the fractious Crusader states demanded a crowned ruler immediately. Baldwin proved astonishingly capable despite his deteriorating condition. At the Battle of Montgisard in November 1177, the sixteen-year-old king personally led a charge of 375 knights against Saladin's army of 26,000 soldiers and won a stunning victory. He fought from horseback even as the disease ravaged his hands and face, eventually requiring him to be carried into battle on a litter when he could no longer ride. As his body failed, Baldwin fought equally fierce political battles against the ambitions of Guy de Lusignan and other nobles scheming to control the succession. He continued governing through regents while blind, unable to walk, and in constant agony. Baldwin died in 1185 at twenty-four, and without his leadership, Jerusalem fell to Saladin just two years later. His reign remains a remarkable study in willpower overcoming physical devastation.