At the beginning of Baldwin IV's reign the Franks ruled the whole of the coastal territory of Syria and Palestine from the Amanus mountains to the Sinai desert. As Map I makes plain there were serious weaknesses in the Frankish defences at several points on the eastern frontier, and the implications of this will be examined in the next chapter.

The states of Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem were autonomous. The prince of Antioch was completely independent of the crown of Jerusalem, although his sovereignty was challenged by the Byzantine emperors who claimed suzerainty over the principality and sometimes succeeded in enforcing their demands. Byzantine claims to overlordship of parts of the county of Tripoli were a dead letter by the 1170s, and although the counts were bound by ties of personal homage to the kings of Jerusalem, the king had no right to intervene in Tripoli's internal administration, while the count was not bound by treaties which the king made with foreign powers. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to overemphasise the degree of separatism between the states; they had always been willing to assist each other when threatened by Muslim powers, and by Baldwin IV's reign, as a result of intermarriage, all three ruling houses were closely related, and this increased the likelihood of mutual intervention. Although there were important differences in some areas, the political, military and social structures of Tripoli and Antioch had a great deal in common with those of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The central government in Jerusalem was carried out by the king with the help of great officers of state, very like those employed by the French crown at the time of the First Crusade. The fullest accounts of their duties are given by thirteenth-century jurists, but these agree in the main with the reports of their activities in twelfth-century sources. None of these posts was hereditary and so the appointments were an important part of crown patronage. The chancellor, head of the king's writing office and keeper of the royal archive, was always a cleric, but the other officials were laymen.