Kingdom of the Wicked on "The Kingdom of Heaven"

[saavedra77]

I love history and have a sort of love-hate relationship with historical melodramas.  The genre tends to appeal to my fascinations with origins, with change, and with the real-but-exotic.  Of course, the bare facts are rarely sufficient in themselves to achieve a dramatic effect without at least some imaginative intervention, and onscreen historical fictions are generally more faithful to Hollywood story conventions than to history as such.  And, yes, most of the audience is there to be entertained, not to participate in a conversation about how things used to be or how they got to be the way they are.  But, being me, I often find myself watching a movie like The Kingdom of Heaven with one eye on the film's success as simple storytelling, or spectacle, and another on how much it really tells you about a real place and time.  It makes for a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

Contrary to expectation, however, I found that The Kingdom of Heaven derived some of its most effective dramatic moments from history, and was at its weakest when the writers indulged their own cliché-ridden imaginations:  The twelfth-century Kingdom of Jerusalem really was divided between, on the one hand, a longer-established faction that had achieved a truce with the Muslim ruler Salah al-Din (Saladin, then the sultan of Egypt and Syria), and, on the other, more recent arrivals from Europe who were still hot on smiting Saracens.  The truce-making side was at least nominally led by Jerusalem's King Baldwin IV, who was indeed dying of leprosy.  Other members of Baldwin's faction included Raymond III of Tripoli (in the film called "The Count of Tiberias", described by the Arab writer Amin Maalouf as "very dark, with a hawk nose, fluent in Arabic," he "could have passed for a Syrian emir") and Balian of Ibelin, the figure the film chooses as its protagonist.  The war party did include the King's brother-in-law, Guy de Lusignan (whom Maalouf calls "a handsome, dimwitted man completely devoid of political or military competence"), as well as the unruly Raynald de Chatillon (according to Maalouf: "as gifted in servility as he was in arrogance"). 

As in the film, the warlike Raynald refused to be bound by Baldwin IV's truce with Saladin (Maalouf paraphrases Raynald as asking "what was the value of an oath sworn to infidels?") and sets to raiding Muslim caravans from his Dead Sea fortress of Karak--in fact, Raynald also sent ships to pillage ports along the Red Sea and threaten Mecca itself.  Raynald's provocations led Saladin to attack Karak in 1183, only to be turned back by Baldwin's forces under Raymond of Tripoli (probably not, as so dramatically portrayed in the film, under the ailing leper king himself!).  Baldwin IV finally died in 1185, to be succeeded briefly by his infant nephew Baldwin V (a noisome detail that the film understandably passes over) with Raymond of Tripoli serving as the boy's regent.  But when the sickly child king died in 1186, the throne passed to his mother (Baldwin IV's sister), Sibylla and her husband, Guy de Lusignan, who permitted Raynald to break the truce by renewing his caravan raids.  Fearing a war with Saladin, Raymond of Tripoli then went so far as to attempt to make a separate peace with the sultan, only to be driven back into the Christian camp by the threat of excommunication.  Raymond still counseled King Guy against war, but when Saladin invaded Crusader territory, he and Balian (unlike in the film) both joined the King in riding out to meet the sultan's forces.  Saladin outmaneuvered Guy's forces by denying them access to water, and then swooped in for the kill at the Battle of Hattin, where the Muslim forces destroyed the Frankish army, taking Guy and other aristocrats prisoner, and capturing the the Crusaders' most sacred icon, the "True Cross", on whose very beams the Christians believed that Jesus had been crucified.  And while Saladin spared Jerusalem's defeated king, a Muslim chronicler relates the story of the sultan's decision to execute Raynald de Chatillon--more or less as portrayed in the film.  Meanwhile, Raymond escaped to his stronghold at Tripoli (perhaps again thinking of making a separate peace), while Balian joined his wife Maria and Queen Sibylla in Jerusalem.

This set the stage for the seige and conquest of Jerusalem itself.  Defense of the city did indeed fall to Balian, who (Maalouf writes) by this time "held a rank among the Franj [Franks, Crusaders] more or less equal to that of king."  Saladin's forces breached Jerusalem's walls nine days after encircling the city and demanded its unconditional surrender.  Balian responded by promising that if the sultan's army pressed on, Balian's men would destroy the al-Aqsa mosque, kill all their Muslim prisoners, destroy everything of value within the city walls, and fight to the last man ("Not one of us will die without having killed several of you!").  In other words, Saladin could only take the city by force by losing everything of value in it, not to mention many more of his soldiers.  So the sultan and Balian came to terms: Balian, along with other aristocrats and their families and the Catholic clergy, were permitted to ransom their freedom, and to raise funds for the release of many poorer Franks.

As strong a narrative framework as these events provide, the filmmakers evidently felt safer garlanding them with some Hollywood clichés. Far from enhancing the story, however, I thought that these simply revealed the filmmakers' lack of imagination: Balian, Our Hero, is transformed into a Common Man, a simple blacksmith fresh off the boat (or, as it happens, fresh from the shipwreck) who has learned "knighthood in one easy lesson" from his estranged Crusader father.  He's just a decent, regular guy who happens to have a way with a broadsword.  I suppose that this is meant to make Orlando Bloom's character easier to identify with (in that he's both "ordinary" and as new to the environment as the viewer), but it also makes it hard to believe that he's the brilliant hand-to-hand fighter and strategic genius that the film makes him out to be.  The historical Balian (son of Barisan--not "Godfrey"--of Ibelin, BTW) never lived in France or anywhere else in Europe, was born in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and after its fall decamped with his family to Raymond's surviving Christian stronghold of Tripoli (incidentally, this is the Tripoli in Lebanon, not the city of the same name in Libya).  So, not only did Balian not go back to Europe (symbolizing the ultimate failure of the Crusades), he actually stayed to raise a son, John, who would fight in the Third Crusade.  Also, since OUR HERO must have a suitably impressive LOVE INTEREST, the film makes Balian Sibylla's secret boytoy.  That way, the bad guy is both his political and romantic rival!  ('Cuz we don't really care about all that political stuff ...)  Interestingly, the historical Balian was actually married to the Sibylla's stepmother, the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena.  (Sibylla seems to have been courted by just about every important noble in the Kingdom of Jerusalem except Balian--from Raymond/"Tiberias" to Balian's brother Baldwin of Ibelin.  Maybe being married to Sibylla's stepmother just smothered the romantic possibilities ...)  In fact, Sibylla herself proved remarkably loyal to her husband Guy long after the fall of Jerusalem, eventually following him to Cyprus.

Some other facts inconvenient to a Hollywood storyline: Baldwin IV's Jerusalem had established a peace with Saladin, but the Crusader city was not some sort of multicultural oasis open to Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike.  Frankish Catholic Crusaders were its ruling class, Muslims and Jews were excluded, and even Christians belonging to the Eastern Churches--e.g., Orthodox and Jacobite Christians--had actually fared better under Muslim rule than under the Franks.  Some Eastern Christians may well have hoped for Saladin's victory (one of Saladin's advisors is said to have been an Orthodox priest named Yusef Batit).  And when Jerusalem fell, many of those among the city's less notable residents who were not ransomed were enslaved by the conquerors. 

Granted, none of these facts make for smooth Hollywood-style storytelling, where there must be a just City on the Hill to fight for, where the protagonists Always Do the Right Thing, and Virtue Always Triumphs ...  Maybe the biggest problem that all Hollywood historical epics face is that history rarely ties events in anything like that neat a package.

But do I recommend the movie?  Sure, if you like costume drama, exotic desert locales, swordplay, spectacular battle scenes (this is a Ridley Scott film, after all), pure imagery (I'm thinking particularly of the portrayal of Edward Norton's Baldwin in his silver mask and strange costume--I've no idea whether it was historical, but it was certainly striking), or if you're a big fan of any of the film's scenery-chewing big stars.  Just remember that if a scene looks, sounds, feels like a Hollywood cliché, that's probably all that it is ...