King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emerged as a heroic leader in no small part because of his willingness to endure the dangers and hardships of the battlefield for a cause that seems larger than him. In this, he parallels the popularity of another unlikely ruler of the Middle Ages: King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, aka “the leper king”.

Baldwin was only nine when he contracted Hansen’s Disease, a bacteria-born illness that slowly degrades the skin and the nervous system, disfiguring and disabling the body along the way. (The image here shows the young boy being diagnosed, having lost feeling in his arm.) In the Central Middle Ages, King Baldwin’s lifetime, the disease was basically fatal — it also was usually met with grave social stigma. Lepers, like Jews and Christian heretics, were often associated with pollution and sin, and subjected to ostracization.

But this was not Baldwin’s treatment. In 1174, the then 13-year old Baldwin’s father died, leaving the young teen in charge of the imperiled Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Despite his illness, which caused Baldwin to lack feeling in his arm and later destroyed his other limbs, Baldwin insisted that he attend the wars against the kingdom’s most powerful opponent, the Egyptian ruler Saladin. He participated in the fighting and successfully led forces in Damascus against Saladin. As time went on, Baldwin had to contend with a factious court. At points, he wanted to abdicate the throne due to his illness, but he recognized that he was a unifying figure. Less than six months before his death at age 23 or 24, Baldwin accompanied his troops in a successful counterattack against Saladin. He was blind and immobilized, and carried by his men on a litter.

Incidentally, Baldwin IV is shown in popular culture wearing a “leper’s mask” to hide his disfigurement, but no contemporary source has him doing this — he instead was very public with his disease. More often, mask wearing in the Middle Ages was done by the healthy to avoid getting sick, as the second image of a priest covering his mouth with a cloth while hearing a leper’s confession demonstrates.