William of Tyre

Anyone asking who was William of Tyre must begin in Jerusalem itself, where he was born around 1130 to a family of European settlers, probably merchants of French or Italian origin who had made their home in the holy city within a generation of its capture by the First Crusade in 1099 ^[1]. He was therefore a native of the Latin East, part of the second generation of Franks born overseas, and his chronicle carries the perspective of a man writing about his own homeland rather than a distant mission field ^[2].

Little is recorded of his parents, though he mentions a brother, Ralph, who followed a secular career in the kingdom. William received his first schooling in Jerusalem, likely at the school attached to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where he later recalled studying under a master named John the Pisan ^[3]. Growing up in a city where Latin Christians governed a population of Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Jews gave him an early familiarity with the languages and politics of the region that few European-trained clerics could match.

The Jerusalem of his boyhood was a working capital, not yet the embattled city of the 1180s. King Fulk and then the regency of Queen Melisende presided over a kingdom still expanding, and the fall of Edessa to Zengi in 1144, which triggered the Second Crusade, occurred while William was still a teenager preparing to leave for the schools of the West ^[4].

Around 1145 or 1146 William sailed for Europe, beginning close to twenty years of study that made him one of the best educated men of his age. The details were unknown to modern scholars until 1961, when the philologist Robert Huygens discovered a lost autobiographical chapter of his chronicle in a Vatican manuscript, in which William lists his teachers by name ^[3]. The find transformed understanding of his intellectual formation.

He studied the liberal arts and theology in Paris and Orléans for about ten years, hearing some of the most celebrated masters of the twelfth-century schools, among them Peter Lombard, whose Sentences became the standard theology textbook of medieval universities ^[3]. He then moved to Bologna, the great center of legal studies, where he read civil law under pupils of the famous Four Doctors of Roman law ^[1]. This combination of theology, classical learning, and jurisprudence was rare, and it shows throughout his historical writing in careful attention to documents, treaties, and legal argument.

William returned to the Latin East in 1165, a mature scholar in his mid thirties. The kingdom he came home to was ruled by Amalric I, an ambitious king pursuing campaigns in Egypt, and it needed literate administrators. Within a year William held a canonry at Acre, granted at the king's request, the first step in a rapid official career ^[2].

Preferment came quickly. In 1167 William was appointed archdeacon of Tyre, one of the senior administrative posts in the church of the kingdom, and King Amalric began to employ him on diplomatic business ^[1]. In 1168 he traveled to Constantinople as an envoy to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, helping to negotiate the alliance that underpinned the joint Frankish and Byzantine attack on Egypt the following year ^[4]. Amalric also gave him a commission that shaped the rest of his life: to write a history of the kingdom, with access to the royal archives.

An even more personal trust followed. Around 1170 the king made William tutor to his young son Baldwin. In one of the most quoted passages of medieval literature, William describes noticing that the boy felt no pain when his playmates pinched his arms during games, an observation the tutor initially took for stoicism before physicians confirmed the early signs of leprosy ^[5]. Baldwin succeeded his father in 1174 as Baldwin IV, and his teacher's affectionate, grieving portrait of the leper king runs through the final books of the chronicle.

With Amalric's death in 1174, the regent Raymond III of Tripoli appointed William chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, head of the royal writing office. A year later, in 1175, he was elected archbishop of Tyre, the second-ranking see in the kingdom after the patriarchate of Jerusalem ^[1]. For the next decade he combined the two offices, standing near the center of every major political decision the kingdom made.

Any list of William of Tyre achievements begins with his great Latin chronicle, known by convention as the Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, the history of deeds done beyond the sea. Composed in twenty-three books between roughly 1170 and 1184, it opens with the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 and carries the story of the crusader states down almost to the moment of writing ^[6]. For the events of his own lifetime it is an eyewitness account by a chancellor and archbishop with the archives of the kingdom at his desk; for the whole period it remains the indispensable narrative source, and historians of the crusades still build on it today ^[1].

The work is remarkable for more than its information. William wrote polished Latin modeled on classical historians, weighed conflicting reports, quoted charters and letters, and was willing to criticize crusader leaders, including kings and patriarchs, when he judged that greed or folly had damaged the Christian cause ^[2]. He sought natural and political explanations for the kingdom's growing weakness, pointing to disunity among the Franks and the unification of its Muslim neighbors under Nur al-Din and then Saladin, rather than resting on providence alone ^[6].

He also wrote a second major work, now lost, a history of the Islamic East from the time of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to his own day, usually cited as the Gesta orientalium principum, for which he drew on Arabic sources ^[1]. Its disappearance is one of the great losses of medieval historiography, since no other Latin author of the period attempted anything comparable. A third lost work described the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which William attended in Rome as part of the delegation from the Latin East ^[4].

The final decade of William's life was clouded by political defeat. As Baldwin IV's disease worsened, the court split into rival factions, broadly dividing those who favored the regent Raymond of Tripoli, with whom William was aligned, from a circle around the king's mother Agnes of Courtenay ^[5]. When the patriarch of Jerusalem died in 1180, William was an obvious candidate to succeed him. Instead the election went to Eraclius, archbishop of Caesarea, a man widely believed to owe his rise to Agnes's favor ^[1].

William kept his see and his pen, but his influence at court declined, and he appears to have given up the chancellorship in the mid 1180s. A later legend, recorded in the thirteenth-century Old French continuations of his chronicle, claimed that Eraclius excommunicated him and that William died of poison while pursuing an appeal in Rome. Modern scholars treat the story with heavy skepticism, since no contemporary evidence supports it ^[1].

He died in 1186, most likely on 29 September, and the necrology that records his death places his final years in the East rather than in Italian exile ^[1]. His chronicle breaks off in 1184 with dark reflections on the kingdom's prospects. He did not live to see the army of Jerusalem destroyed at Hattin in July 1187 or Saladin's entry into the holy city that October, events his last books had all but foreseen ^[4].

William's history had an afterlife few medieval books can match. Early in the thirteenth century it was translated into Old French as the Estoire d'Eracles, and anonymous continuators extended the narrative deep into the century, making it the standard account of the crusades for medieval readers in Europe ^[6]. William Caxton printed an English version of related material in 1481, and the chronicle's stories, including the pinching of the young Baldwin's arm, passed into the common stock of crusading memory ^[2].

Among modern historians his reputation stands high but not uncriticized. The study by Peter Edbury and John Rowe, the fullest modern account, portrays a writer of exceptional intelligence whose judgments were nonetheless shaped by his factional loyalties, particularly his hostility to the court party that blocked his path to the patriarchate ^[1]. Readers of any William of Tyre biography learn to admire the historian while checking him against charters, Arabic chronicles, and archaeology. The critical edition of his Latin text, completed by Huygens in 1986, gave scholarship a reliable foundation ^[6].

The basic William of Tyre facts explain his enduring importance: a native of Jerusalem, trained in the best schools of Europe, who held high office in both church and state and used that vantage point to write the history of his own society as it slid toward disaster. No other twelfth-century state, East or West, found so capable a chronicler among its own officials, and the history of the crusader kingdoms would be immeasurably poorer without him ^[4].