Child king of Jerusalem (1185–1186), crowned co-king to secure the succession of his dying uncle Baldwin IV; his death at about nine triggered the crisis that led to Hattin.
Baldwin V was king of Jerusalem from 1185 to 1186, a child who reigned for barely a year. The son of Sibylla of Jerusalem and grandson of King Amalric I, he was crowned co-king in 1183, while still an infant, alongside his uncle the leper king Baldwin IV, in an attempt to secure the succession of the crusader kingdom before Baldwin IV's death.
When Baldwin IV died in 1185 the boy became sole king under the regency of Raymond III of Tripoli, but he was sickly and died the following year at about the age of nine. His death removed the compromise heir and plunged the kingdom into the succession dispute — between his mother Sibylla with Guy of Lusignan and the barons who favoured Isabella — that fatally divided Jerusalem on the eve of the disaster at Hattin.
Baldwin was born in 1177, the only son of Sibylla of Jerusalem and her first husband, William "Longsword" of Montferrat, who died shortly before or after the boy's birth. Through his mother he was the grandson of King Amalric I and the nephew of the reigning king, Baldwin IV, whose leprosy meant he could father no heir of his own.
The child therefore stood close to the throne from birth. As Baldwin IV's illness advanced, the boy became the focus of the kingdom's desperate search for a stable succession that would not simply hand power to his mother's controversial second husband, Guy of Lusignan.
Baldwin V died too young for any real character to be recorded; he is remembered less as a person than as a symbol of the crusader kingdom's dynastic desperation. What the sources dwell on is his frailty — a sickly child whose life was the thread on which the peace of the realm hung.
His significance is entirely that of the innocent placeholder. The barons crowned an infant precisely because he was neutral: not Guy of Lusignan, not any single faction, but the pure blood-claim of the royal house. That the kingdom's survival should rest on so fragile a life is itself the measure of how divided and endangered Jerusalem had become in the 1180s.
To forestall a disputed succession, Baldwin IV had the boy crowned co-king in 1183, carried to his coronation in the arms of a tall knight so the people could see him. Arrangements were made for a regency and even for the great powers of Europe to arbitrate the succession should the child die young.
On Baldwin IV's death in 1185 the boy reigned alone as Baldwin V, with Raymond III of Tripoli as regent and Joscelin of Courtenay as his guardian. But the careful settlement lasted barely a year: Baldwin V died in the late summer of 1186, and the compromise died with him.
Baldwin V's death in 1186 removed the one figure all parties had accepted. His mother Sibylla and her husband Guy of Lusignan moved swiftly, and Sibylla was crowned queen on condition — which she then evaded — of setting Guy aside; instead she crowned Guy king with her own hands. The barons who had backed the claim of her half-sister Isabella were outmanoeuvred but not reconciled.
The kingdom thus entered its gravest crisis bitterly divided between Guy's party and its opponents. Within a year that division helped bring on the catastrophe of the Battle of Hattin in 1187 and the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin.
Baldwin V is remembered as the child king whose brief life and early death mark the hinge on which the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem turned toward ruin. So long as he lived, the succession was settled; when he died, the kingdom fractured, Guy of Lusignan took the crown, and the road to Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem lay open. His reign is a study in how a realm can be undone by the failure of a single fragile life.