Amalric I (1163–1174) staked Jerusalem's future on five invasions of Egypt — and lost the race: Saladin's rise in Cairo closed the ring his campaigns had tried to break.
Amalric received the crown in 1163 on a lawyer's condition — his marriage to Agnes de Courtenay annulled, their children Baldwin and Sibylla ruled legitimate — and spent his reign on a single strategic idea: Fatimid Egypt, decadent and fabulously rich, must belong to Jerusalem or to Nur ad-Din, and whoever held both banks held the crusader states' fate.
Five expeditions (1163–1169) came heartbreakingly close — in 1167 his men garrisoned Alexandria and a Frankish resident sat in Cairo — before the extortionate invasion of 1168 threw the Egyptians into Nur ad-Din's arms: Shirkuh took Cairo, and Shirkuh's nephew Saladin inherited it. Amalric died in 1174 two months after Nur ad-Din, leaving a thirteen-year-old leper facing the man who now ruled both Egypt and Damascus.
Born in 1136, the younger son, Amalric grew up in his brother's shadow and his mother's party — he stood with Melisende in the crisis of 1152 — and was invested with the new county of Jaffa and Ascalon after 1153: the southern command facing Egypt, which shaped everything he later attempted.
The succession of 1163 was conditional: the Haute Cour balked at Agnes de Courtenay as queen, consanguinity supplied the pretext, and Amalric accepted the annulment with the children's rights preserved — the fateful clause — before his coronation.
William of Tyre — Amalric's own choice as tutor to his son and archdeacon-historian — wrote the king from close observation and evident, complicated respect: taciturn where Baldwin III had charmed (a slight stammer embarrassed him), given to fits of laughter that shook his heavy frame, restless in intelligence — the king peppered William with theological doubts and legal puzzles — and immovable in adversity, the eye of every routed field. He was, the archbishop notes with clerical wincing, fond of other men's wives and remorseless about church taxation.
The assize attributed to his reign that bound rear-vassals directly to the crown, his codifying instinct, and the census-treaty precision of his Byzantine diplomacy show the judicial mind under the soldier; Runciman's summary — the last king of Jerusalem who governed as well as reigned — follows William's own.
The Egyptian decade ran like a tragedy in five acts: 1163, the Nile-flood repulse at Pelusium; 1164, invited in by the ousted vizier Shawar against Shirkuh — Nur ad-Din's counter-move at Harim in the north costing the Franks an army and nearly Antioch; 1167, the great campaign — Alexandria besieged over Saladin's first command, tribute trebled, a Frankish prefect in Cairo; 1168, the unprovoked winter invasion, pressed by the Hospitallers over the king's treaty scruples, Bilbeis massacred — and Shawar's Cairo, choosing between conquerors, calling in Shirkuh for good. By January 1169 the vizierate was Shirkuh's, then dead Shirkuh's nephew Saladin's; the Fatimid caliphate itself was abolished in 1171.
The Byzantine alliance was the other pillar: married to Maria Komnene in 1167, Amalric sailed to Constantinople himself in 1171 — the first king of Jerusalem to do homage in the Queen of Cities — and the joint fleet-and-army design on Egypt was rebuilding (the 1169 Damietta attempt had failed in recrimination and rain) when both protagonists died: Nur ad-Din in May 1174, Amalric of dysentery on 11 July, thirty-eight years old, his last campaign an abortive lunge at Banias.
The verdict of events was total: the Egypt he failed to take crowned the man who would destroy the kingdom — Hattin came thirteen years after his death, Jerusalem's fall within fourteen. Yet the strategic reading was correct, as Richard the Lionheart's identical conclusion on the Third Crusade would confirm: Jerusalem's security ran through Cairo, and the resources to hold Cairo never crossed the sea in time.
His household became the kingdom's dramatis personae: Baldwin IV the leper hero, Sibylla and her Guy, Isabella and her four husbands — and his historian William of Tyre, whose great chronicle, commissioned and informed by the king, remains the window through which the whole Latin East is seen.