Did King Baldwin IV Really Offer the Crown to Balian of Ibelin? ∙ Balian of Ibelin and the Myth of Kingship

Start hereIn 1187 only two knights were left in Jerusalem, according to Ernoul, both survivors of Hattin. Yet the city held out until 2 October, about two weeks after Saladin took up position outside the walls. Who led its defence?

01Did Baldwin IV offer Balian the crown?

None of the four chronicles we searched records Baldwin IV offering Balian of Ibelin the crown. The four are William of Tyre, the chronicle attributed to Ernoul, Baha ad-Din and Ibn al-Athir.

The idea comes from Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven (2005), written by William Monahan. In the film, the dying King Baldwin does not want the kingdom to pass to Guy de Lusignan. Balian looks like a good candidate to become Sibylla’s husband and the next king, but he refuses to take part in the plot.

The real Balian did not need a crown to matter. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir wrote that Balian’s rank among the Franks came close to the king’s.

02Who Balian was

Balian came from a noble family. William of Tyre’s modern translators call him “a member of the older nobility”.

William of Tyre, writing in the kingdom at the time, names him as one of the three sons of Balian the elder (also called Barisan). The three were Hugh, Baldwin and Balian, and all took the surname Ibelin from the castle their father guarded.

In 1177 Balian married Queen Maria, the widow of King Amalric, with the king’s consent. With her, Balian received the city of Nablus, her jointure, to hold for her lifetime.

Maria, a Greek (Byzantine) princess, had been Amalric’s second wife, so she was Baldwin IV’s stepmother. The marriage also made Balian stepfather to Maria’s daughter by Amalric, Isabella, a half-sister of Baldwin IV.

So he was not an outsider who rose. He married into the royal family, and the kingdom’s politics were his day job.

03The succession crisis

The real crisis turned on marriages and a child king, not on an offer to Balian.

• In April 1180 Baldwin IV married his sister Sibylla to Guy de Lusignan and made him Count of Jaffa. William of Tyre, who disapproved, notes that the wedding was held in Easter week, against custom.
• Baldwin V was not Guy’s son. He was Sibylla’s son by her first husband, William of Montferrat, known as Longsword, who died in June 1177 leaving her pregnant.
• Homage was done to the child while his uncle still lived. After Baldwin IV’s death the regent was Raymond III of Tripoli, not Balian.
• After Baldwin IV died in 1185, Baldwin V bore the title alone for scarcely a year and died in 1186, still a boy.
• His death opened the crisis. In a coup led by Sibylla and Joscelin, the brother of her mother Agnes, Guy was made king, and Raymond’s regency ended.

04Balian in the crisis of 1186

The film shows a newcomer who finds himself in the middle of palace intrigue. The record shows a baron at the centre of events.

• When Guy was crowned in 1186, the barons who opposed him planned to crown Isabella’s husband, Humphrey of Toron, instead. Raymond III and Balian’s brother Baldwin of Ramla were among them.
• Humphrey slipped away to Jerusalem and did homage to Sibylla, and the plan collapsed.
• In 1186–87 Balian was one of the envoys Guy sent to make peace with Raymond. The chronicle attributed to Ernoul says Balian also advised Guy to seek that reconciliation.
• Ernoul was no neutral witness. William of Tyre’s translators note that Ernoul was serving as Balian’s squire at Hattin in 1187.

05Defending Jerusalem, 1187

Here the film is closest to the record, though the details differ.

Balian was in the rearguard at Hattin in 1187 and escaped to Tyre. He asked Saladin’s leave to go to Jerusalem to bring out his wife and children, promising to stay only one night and not to bear arms.

In Jerusalem the townspeople begged him to stay and be their lord. The Patriarch absolved him of his oath to Saladin, Balian agreed, and the city did homage to him and received him as its lord. Ernoul’s 19th-century editor sums this up as Balian receiving homage “as regent” (our translation); Ernoul’s own text says only that the city received him as its lord.

According to Ernoul, only two knights were left in the city, both survivors of Hattin. So Balian knighted up to sixty sons of burgesses (fifty, in some manuscripts), to have anyone at all to lead.

Saladin took up position outside the walls on 20 September 1187, and the city surrendered on 2 October 1187, about two weeks later.

Ibn al-Athir gives Balian’s leverage as a threat. If they were refused terms, he says, the defenders would:

• kill their own families and burn their goods;
• pull down the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque;
• kill the 5,000 Muslim prisoners in the city.

Saladin’s council advised him to accept a ransom. What Balian won was ransom terms, not freedom. In Ernoul’s account of the terms, those who could pay their ransom left, and those who could not were to stay as slaves.

Ibn al-Athir records that Balian offered 30,000 dinars on behalf of the poor. The full account, with both sides’ numbers, is in Salahuddin Ayyubi: Righteousness of the Faith.

06After Jerusalem: deciding who ruled

Balian never held the crown. What he did instead was help decide who would rule.

• In 1190, after Queen Sibylla died, Isabella’s marriage to Humphrey of Toron was set aside. She married Conrad of Montferrat, which gave Conrad a claim to the throne against Guy.
• The Itinerarium Peregrinorum is a chronicle of King Richard’s crusade, and openly hostile to Conrad and his supporters, Balian among them. It names Balian and Maria among those Conrad won over to persuade Isabella to seek the separation.
• In 1192 Balian took part in the peace talks between Richard and Saladin. The truce was dated 2 September 1192 and was to last three years.
• Saladin’s biographer Baha ad-Din names “the son of Birezin”, Balian, among those who were told its terms and accepted them.
• After the truce, according to Ernoul, Saladin gave Balian a castle five leagues from Acre, called Caymont in some manuscripts, with its land.

07Whose line is “a kingdom of conscience”?

People search for this line, so it is worth being exact. It is film dialogue, and it is Balian’s, not Baldwin IV’s.

• Early in the film, when Balian asks what a king could ask of a man like him, Godfrey of Ibelin answers: “A better world than has ever been seen. A kingdom of conscience. A kingdom of heaven.”
• Later, when a knight tells Balian that Jerusalem has no need of a perfect knight, Balian answers: “No. It is a kingdom of conscience, or nothing.”

Neither line is in William of Tyre’s history of the kingdom. Both belong to the screenplay.

08The film and the record

Kingdom of Heaven is a drama, not a reliable history. Its blacksmith Balian, the plan to make him king and its best-known lines come from the screenplay, not from the chronicles.

	In the film	In the record
Who he is	Balian is a blacksmith, the unknown son of a crusader baron	A noble of the Ibelin family, married to a queen (who he was)
The crown	A candidate for Sibylla’s hand and the throne	No offer in the chronicles we searched (above)
The ending	Balian ends back in his village, telling Richard the Lionheart, “I am the blacksmith.”	A part in the 1192 peace, and a castle near Acre (after Jerusalem)

09His legacy

Balian mattered without a crown. He helped defend a city and decide a succession.

In our reading, the real story is more interesting than the invented one. The film’s hero refuses a crown. The real baron bargained for a city’s terms and, by one hostile account, helped end a royal marriage.

More on these years: Baldwin IV, the Leper King and the sieges of Kerak.

10Quick answers

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• William of Tyre (Babcock and Krey's 1943 translation), the chronicle attributed to Ernoul (1871 edition), Baha ad-Din (the 1897 Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society translation), Ibn al-Athir (the 1872 French translation) and the Itinerarium Peregrinorum (Bohn, 1848) were read in their Internet Archive scans.
• That no chronicle records a crown offer rests on full-text searches of the four chronicles named in the first section, not of every source of the period.
• Ernoul is in Old French and Ibn al-Athir is read in French; the English renderings are ours.
• The film's lines were checked against scene transcripts on Clip.Cafe, and its plot against reviews in PopMatters and Plugged In.
• Some details often repeated about Balian, such as his birth and death years and the year he became lord of Ibelin, had no source we could open, so they are not on the page.

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