Baldwin III. was the first of the kings of Jerusalem who was a native of the soil of Palestine. His three predecessors had all been emigrants from the West. His reign also marks a new departure from another point of view. His predecessors had been men of a type half military, half clerical--at once hard fighters and sound churchmen. Baldwin was a man of a subtler type--a man capable of dealing with the intrigues of a court and with problems of law, and, as such, suited for guiding the middle age of the kingdom, which the different qualities of his predecessors had been equally suited to found. Like his brother, Amalric I., he was a clerkly and studious king versed [v.03 p.0247] in law, and ready to discuss points of dogma. In an excellent sketch of Baldwin's character (xvi. cii.), William of Tyre tells us that he spent his spare time in reading and had a particular affection for history; that he was well skilled in the _jus consuetudinarium_ of the kingdom (afterwards recorded by lawyers like John of Ibelin and Philip of Novara as "the assizes of Jerusalem"); and that he had the royal faculty for remembering faces, and could generally be trusted to address by name anybody whom he had once met, so that he was more popular with high and low than any of his predecessors. He had, William also reports, a gift of impromptu eloquence, and a faculty both for saying witty things pleasantly at other >people's expense and for listening placidly to witticisms directed against himself; while he was generous to excess without needing to make exactions in order to support his generosity, and always respected the Church. If in his youth he had been prone to gambling, and before his marriage with Theodora had been somewhat lax in his morals, when he became a man he put away childish things; his married life was a shining example to his people and he was abstemious both in food and drink, holding that "excess in either was an incentive to the worst of crimes." Even his enemy, Nureddin, said of him, when he died--"the Franks have lost such a prince that the world has not now his like." Entry: BALDWIN