Baldwin III, King of Jerusalem

BALDOVINO III, king of GERUSALEMME. - Son of Folco d'Angiò, born about 1130, died 10 February 1162. He was under the guardianship of his mother, Queen Melisende, who had him anointed and crowned king of Jerusalem at the age of thirteen in the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre on 25 December 1143. Barely a year later (1144), the sultan of Mossul and Aleppo, 'Imād ad-dīn Zenkl, seized Edessa, the eastern bulwark of Crusader rule. The news of that terrible loss provoked the Second Crusade in the West (1147–48), which ended in complete failure. In 1148 B. undertook an expedition against the Saracens holding Damascus with Emperor Corrado III of Germany and King Ludovico VII of France, but failed to recapture the city. More disastrous than the military reverses was the discord among the Crusaders and the individual Latin states in Palestine; B. also came into conflict over authority with his mother, Queen Melisende, in 1152. The following year B. won an important military success by conquering the fortress of Ascalona, occupied by the Saracens. After a few years of tranquillity, he had to resume the struggle against Nūr ed-dīn, who from Damascus threatened all the Latin states of the East, which had placed themselves under the ineffective protection of the Byzantine Empire. B. did not live to see the end of that struggle, for he died at Beirut on 10 February 1162, aged thirty-two, without a son to succeed him.