History

The masked, silent king of Kingdom of Heaven is a film invention. The Baldwin IV of the record is stranger and more interesting — a visibly dying teenager who rode out at sixteen and beat Saladin in open battle, and whose death removed the one thing holding a fractious kingdom together.

Spain's national hero spent years of his career in the paid service of a Muslim king, making war on Christian rulers on his behalf. The Reconquista champion was assembled after his death, out of a poem and a nationalism he never heard of, and the man underneath refuses to resolve into either hero or mercenary.

The Great Heathen Army landed in 865 and the invasion is in the contemporary record. Ivar mostly is not — a ninth-century name with a thirteenth-century character built around it, a byname nobody has explained, and a famous manner of killing that belongs to saga rather than to the annals.

Saladin is very nearly the only medieval Muslim ruler with a warm reputation in Western memory, and a great deal of that reputation was written by the people he defeated. The record underneath is harder and more interesting — an officer with no dynastic claim who spent more of his career fighting other Muslim rulers than fighting crusaders.