“Amalric died in the same year, succeeded by perhaps the most gallant figure of the whole Frankish venture, the leper king, Baldwin IV ([reign] 1174-85), who inherited the throne at thirteen, a year after his leprosy had been discovered [sic]. He literally dropped to pieces during his reign, a via dolorosa on which he showed, with moving courage, political realism and remarkable powers of leadership.” – Desmond Seward, The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders (1996)(p. 50)

If only you had had the power,
the rich king, who is so afflicted,
would have been healed and, unrestricted,
would hold his land in peace and reign;
land he will never hold again.
Do you know what we must withstand,
if the king cannot hold his land and for his wounds obtains no cure?
The married women will endure
their husband's deaths, lands will be wrecked,
and orphaned maids will live abject,
with many deaths among the knights, calamities and other plights,
and you will be the one to blame.
- Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval (ln. 4670-4683)[Cline translation (1983), p. 128]

Before we (finally) get back into something resembling our usual style of content, a few housekeeping matters. For anyone indulgent enough of me to have wanted to purchase a paperback copy of The Gourd and the Stars on Amazon, I’m aware that not only is it listed as out of stock, but there is no way to place an order anymore, either. I’m still hoping that the situation will improve, but unfortunately my publisher claims that they have no way to make Amazon list the book for sale, even as print on demand. This was not how this was portrayed to me when I set this up, but this kind of thing is the less glamorous side of indie publishing, where sometimes things don’t work out the way you want/envisioned. If Amazon keeps stalling, because they are my biggest sales platform, I might delist the paperback for wide distribution and re-release it as KDP exclusive like my other titles in order to keep the tap open on Amazon, so to speak. If that happens, I will update here to keep you all in the loop. In the meantime, G&S in ebook is available on Amazon, and the paperback remains available on Barnes & Noble, and a few other odd sites (like Walmart??); and regardless of the paperback situation, ebook distribution will remain as is on all the major platforms. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

On more pleasant G&S news, anyone who was interested in listening to my talk with my editor on her podcast two weeks ago about my books and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but wasn’t able to make the live chat, here are links to the recorded audio and webcast that you can access at your leisure. We had a really interesting conversation generally about historical fiction and writing craft, but in part because my POV protagonist of The Gourd and Stars, Zénaïde, is an original character, we spent a fair chunk of our G&S-specific time discussing the historical character with the largest presence in the story, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem. Specifically, about using fiction as a vehicle to “discover” a historical person and recreate them as a three-dimensional character your readers can relate to. Because that’s an aspect of craft I haven’t really talked about in detail here, I thought I’d take today to introduce Baldwin to you all in more depth, but through the lens of using history and nonfiction to mold a fictional character.

Joking about Octavius aside, his characterization is in part a reflection of what I generally look for as the first step in my research when I’m reading up on a historical figure: finding primary sources. Obviously the availability of sources from the time period in which your story is set, be they exactly contemporary or near-contemporary, varies throughout history, but if you can find any, they’re your best baseline resource. In part because this is what any later books and research will be based on. For my Ptolemies and Romans, histories and biographies by the likes of classical authors such as Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio are usually my sources for chronology and first impressions vis à vis characterization.

For Baldwin and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, there are several contemporary primary sources, including several from the Muslim tradition, but the main Latin text is William of Tyre’s Deeds Done Beyond the Sea. William (c. 1130-1186 CE) was archbishop of the city of Tyre, one of the major dioceses of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and on the strength of his scholarly reputation served both as chancellor of the kingdom (one of the four highest royal administrative offices, responsible for legal deeds and organizing the diplomatic service) and as royal tutor to Baldwin until his ascension to the throne in 1174. Deeds was William’s magnum opus, an unfinished history of the kingdom from the calling for the First Crusade in 1095 through to his own era, ended with his death in the autumn of 1186. William himself, with his intimate access to the kingdom’s records in the chancellery, crafts his history with narratives from both Christian and local Muslim texts, especially Fulcher of Chartres’ Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium (A history of the expedition to Jerusalem) (written 1101-27) for the part of his narrative dealing with the events of the First Crusade, which obviously was before William’s birth.

Although the part of Deeds dealing with the First Crusade is the most easily found section for us today, the parts I was most interested in were the ones from William’s own time. A problem for a native English speaker, as there is exactly one English translation of the complete Deeds—a seventy year old out of print two volume set from Columbia University Press whose current asking price is between $950 and $4000. Thankfully, some heroic academic scanned it to the Internet Archive and that’s how I finally read volume two, which covers the time period I needed for G&S. After reading it, I feel that my initial interest was justified because William is at his most engaging when he’s talking about events he actually witnessed. And nowhere is this more apparent than when he is talking about Baldwin, the boy he’d known almost from infancy:

It is impossible to refrain from tears while speaking of this great misfortune. For, as [Baldwin] began to reach years of maturity, it was evident that he was suffering from the terrible disease of leprosy. Day by day his condition became worse. The extremities and the face were especially attacked, so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him. Nevertheless, he continued to make progress in the pursuit of letters and gave ever-increasing promise of developing a lovable disposition. He was comely of appearance for his age, and far beyond the custom of his forefathers he was an excellent horseman and understood the handling of horses. He had a retentive memory and loved to talk. He was economical but always remembered both favors and injuries. In every respect he resembled his father [Amalric of Jerusalem], not alone in face but in his entire mien; even his walk and the tones of his voice were the same. His intellect was keen, but his speech was somwhat halting. Like his father he eagerly listened to history and was well disposed to follow good advice.

(Deeds, v.2, p. 287)

Indeed, according to William, as someone who spent most of his day with his young student, he was the one who first noticed the symptoms of leprosy in Baldwin in 1170, when the prince was about nine years old, and the boy exhibits no pain after receiving scratches and bruises playing with his friends, as depicted in the almost charming medieval manuscript illustration below:

Confronted with William’s medical suspicions, King Amalric, the royal doctors, and the Haute Cour, Jerusalem’s high court of barons, were hesitant to declare a definitive diagnosis for Baldwin. This was in part because, although male primogeniture was not absolute in the kingdom of Jerusalem, as Amalric’s only son, Baldwin was still the heir presumptive; but also because during this period of medieval history, it was unusual to make such a potentially life-changing diagnosis on a person so young. While people suffering from leprosy were often sequestered from the general population at this time, some of this was for the comfort of the patient rather than emphatically a banishment based on revulsion or fear of contamination. Leprosariums and so-called lazar-houses were better equipped to deal with a patient’s complex and changing medical needs than perhaps their families would be. This is why, particularly in the twelfth century, if one hears of a patient like Baldwin who was permitted to continue in their previous life after a diagnosis, they are typically members of the nobility, whose households would have the resources for their care.

That said, within a few years of William’s discovery, it was clear that his supposition had been correct and the kingdom had to contend with the fact that their young prince had deadly and horrific disease. What’s interesting is that despite this hard truth, the Haut Cour decided to keep Baldwin as heir and he was crowned king at thirteen when his father died in 1174, with his cousin Raymond of Tripoli serving as his regent until he came of age two years later. This turn of events might come down to the unique circumstances of the kingdom Baldwin inherited.

Even more than many medieval European kingdoms of the time, Jerusalem was notoriously challenging to control. The kings of Jerusalem were very much firsts among equals whose family had been raised up by its companion nobility when they had all conquerored the city together in 1099. The nobles who stayed on after the First Crusade to form the local barony were a group of landless younger sons and rogue European clans who had nothing better to go back to the continent for, and who used the necessary independence they required to defend the kingdom’s borders from its hostile neighbors to form a collection of principalities that were only loosely confederated under the crown in Jerusalem. In short, to be a good king of Jerusalem was a power balancing act and aristocratic consensus was both vital and difficult to achieve. Supporting Baldwin’s candidacy to the throne was at the time likely the only compromise that everyone could agree on, and as my above pull quote suggests, one that William portrays as ultimately a good one, as he writes of his former student as a brave and clever monarch, who “[a]lthough physically weak and impotent, yet mentally he was vigorous, and, far beyond his strength, he strove to hide his illness and to support the cares of the kingdom.” (Deeds, 2.25)

But I’m sure a couple of you have thought of a potential problem with using William of Tyre as your main source for information about Baldwin, and that is the fact that he was Baldwin’s tutor and chancellor—making him a huge potential source of narrative bias when talking about his king. However, bias is something one should be aware of in any primary source, and that’s often where phase two of historical character research comes in: secondary sources. Secondary sources are scholarly works by historians and other experts whom you can use to help you understand and interpret the information in your primary sources. You don’t have to take their views as gospel, but reading as widely as you can about your person/topic will help you sift through what we think we know about them, which in turn will help you craft a fictionalized character who “feels real.”

Secondary source research for Baldwin was honestly somewhat frustrating at first. Despite reigning for eleven years at a pivotal moment in the kingdom’s history, he is usually little more than a footnote in classic Crusader secondary texts like Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades and very few of the dozens of books I read about Latin Jerusalem seemed willing to engage with him beyond talking about his illness or suggesting that nothing William of Tyre wrote about him could be anything but fond propaganda. The only exceptions to this were Bernard Hamilton’s The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge University Press, 2000), the only book-length discussion of Baldwin’s reign that treated him with any agency of his own; and the short, complimentary paragraph from Desmond Seward’s The Monks of War that I quoted above in my flavor text. Outside of Hamilton’s book, Baldwin has been largely demoted by serious scholarship to a bit player in his own life and kingdom. Rather than a king who was chosen and ruled by cleverness and consensus, the mainstream line always seems to hint somewhat condescendingly at a weak invalid who was simply a useful tool to his rebellious barony.

Now, this is not necessarily fatal for the fiction novelist, as, unlike historians, we have the luxury of making things up. If I wanted to, I could simply take the version of Baldwin William of Tyre gave us and thumb my nose at the naysayers. As I mention in the podcast with Jessica, sometimes you just use Suetonius’ gossip because it’s fun and it makes a good story. But even with Suetonius in the God’s Wife books, I have always tried to use the salacious bits in ways that felt plausible, not just because they were juicy. And that was the approach I took to William of Tyre’s work and the criticisms of it. What aspects of his Baldwin felt plausible? How much could/should I trust his judgment? Or anyone else’s for that matter?

In this, I was helped by what I’d call supplemental secondary sources, that is, sources not specifically about Baldwin, but rather about topics circling him and his times. That could (and did) included a whole array of subject matter, but for Baldwin, that was unavoidably sources that talked about leprosy in the medieval period and more broadly about medieval disease and disability. Fortunately for me, if not my research costs, as I’ve said there is a real renaissance happening in that area of medieval studies, and that helped me do what I think has been largely overlooked in non-Hamilton scholarship of Baldwin and his reign, which is to contextualize him, Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, and the events of his kingdom through a disability lens and find a believable truth of character within.

To expand on the example I gave during the podcast, in the Deeds section I quote above, William tells us that “far beyond the custom of his forefathers [Baldwin] was an excellent horseman and understood the handling of horses.” Now, traditional scholarship of the past would likely say to this that William is just applying a common monarchical superlative to his king to make him sound like less of an invalid. Bernard Hamilton, by contrast, uses this as further evidence—even if it is mere propaganda—of his position that Baldwin was an active participant in his reign who chose to center the foundation of his rule not on the idea that he was a suffering religious martyr (a position many people with leprosy were held in at the time), but as a typical young man of his noble/knightly class who defended his kingdom by the sword as much as by law. But if you look at this sentence through a non-pejorative lens of his disabilities—as a young man living with a disease that had according to his tutor specifically attacked the mobility of his extremities and would eventually blind him—you are left with an inescapable fact, especially if you have any working knowledge of horseback riding: he would have to be an extraordinary horseman to simply sit on a horse, let alone ride one into battle for way more years than you might believe possible.

This simple moment of clarity on this singular issue was like the parting of the Red Sea for me from characterization standpoint for Baldwin. It cut through every ableist assumption most of my secondary sources were making and crystallized the portrait Bernard Hamilton had been trying to delineate into an extremely believable person. Combining details like the horsemanship and others from the Deeds quotes I’ve mentioned with facts like how long he continued to rule Jerusalem after it would have been personally much easier and more comfortable for him to abdicate, brought into focus not a weak person who needed his old teacher to drum up a flattering portrait of him for vanity’s sake, but a determined, courageous young man who greatly resembled many of the people I’ve known in my life living with chronic illness or disability. One who wanted to be treated like other kings and men, and not like some object of pity. A person who used his quick-wittedness and acting like he felt better than he did in order to keep his fractious barons in support of his rule. And based on William’s description of Baldwin’s intellect, love of conversation, and fortitude combined with the experiences I’ve had with friends and acquaintances navigating chronic pain and disability, I got the sense that Baldwin was probably pretty funny as well and that’s why he’s generally much less serious than my Zénaïde in The Gourd and the Stars, who is often his practical, reining-in influence. Because humor is sometimes the only thing that will keep the darkness at bay, and the young man still being carried into battle ahead of his troops until almost the very end of his short, difficult life seems like the very last person to succumb to despair.

So, that’s a basic rundown of my general process for turn raw historical data into realistic fiction. But as my other flavor text and my entry title imply, it might not be only me and Ridley Scott who find Baldwin a heroic figure, and it is possible that the tradition we are drawing on is much older. It isn’t definitively verifiable, but there is circumstantial evidence that the Arthurian character of the Fisher King, the mysteriously wounded Grail guardian whom Perceval meets on his quest, is based on Baldwin. The character might have a basis in Celtic mythology, but the version of the character we are most familiar with first appears in Chrétien de Troyes’ iteration of the Perceval story, which we believe, based on its unfinished state, was what the poet was working on around his death c. 1190—exactly contemporary with Baldwin’s reign and the collapse of the kingdom on the heels of his death.

Aside from Baldwin’s existence in Chrétien’s zeitgeist, the Fisher King’s injuries are vaguely connected to his thigh or groin, implying a sexual component to his punishment. This is innocuous enough, unless you also happen to know after several years of historical research for your Crusades romance that leprosy was often seen as a disease connected to sexual misconduct. This could be the patient’s own sexual incontinence, or that of their parents, and the leprous were sometimes held as sexually voracious. The Fisher King is also explicitly impotent and his lack of an heir threatens the safety of his lands, something directly analogous to Baldwin’s situation in Jerusalem. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Chrétien’s Fisher King is distinctly leprously-coded, and if Baldwin isn’t involved in that, it is a heck of a coincidence.

But outside of fiction, there is also evidence for my more positive conclusions about Baldwin’s reign and legacy directly from contemporary sources purporting to report factual information. After the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem shortly following his death, many of the people still living in Palestine in the turbulent period that came after appear to have seen Baldwin, the last successful defender of the realm, as the last righteous king of Christendom in the region. In his chronicle of the largely unsuccessful Seventh Crusade (1248–1254), Life of Saint Louis, Jean de Joinville takes a break from panegyrizing Louis IX of France to recount the opinion of an old man who claimed to remember the before times:

“I have seen a time when King Baldwin of Jerusalem, the one who was a leper, beat Saladin although he only had 300 armed men against Saladin’s 3,000. But now your sins have come to such a pass that we round you up in the fields like cattle.”

(Life of Saint Louis, Hague trans. (1955), p. 137)

And it wasn’t just the few remaining Christians who recalled Baldwin like this. In his contemporary biography of Salah al-Din, The Conquest of Syria and Palestine by Saladin, Muslim historian Imad al-Din al-Isfahani (1125-1201) describes Baldwin’s position in his kingdom and among his barons as follows:

“In spite of illness the Franks were loyal to him, they gave him every encouragement … being satisfied to have him as their ruler; they exalted him … they were anxious to keep him in office, but they paid no attention to his leprosy.”

(The Conquest of Syria and Palestine by Saladin, Hamilton trans. (2000), p. 241)

It’s this amalgamation of sources and intuition that created the Baudouin of my novel, and why I think that informed historical fiction can be a valuable bridge between serious scholarship and the public imagination. In a world starved for diverse characters in fiction, especially disabled representation, it has been my delight to bring someone as tenacious, passionate, and funny as Baldwin to the wider acclaim that so many of those who knew him thought he deserved. A gallant figure, indeed.