William of Tyre was a medieval prelate and chronicler. As archbishop of Tyre, he is sometimes known as William II to distinguish him from his predecessor, William I, the Englishman, a former prior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, who was Archbishop of Tyre from 1127 to 1135. He grew up in Jerusalem at the height of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been established in 1099 after the First Crusade, and he spent twenty years studying the liberal arts and canon law in the universities of Europe.
William of Tyre writing his history, from a 13th-century Old French translation, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS 2631, f.1r
William of Tyre discovers Baldwin's first symptoms of leprosy (MS of L'Estoire d'Eracles (French translation of William of Tyre's Historia), painted in France, 1250s. British Library, London).
Saladin burning a town, from a manuscript of the French translation of the Historia
Sixteenth-century bronze statue of Godfrey of Bouillon from the group of heroes surrounding the memorial to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor in the Hofkirche, Innsbruck. By William's time, Godfrey was seen as the heroic leader of the First Crusade, and his strength and virtue had become legendary.
The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the middle ages. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. While Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule for hundreds of years, by the 11th century the Seljuk takeover of the region threatened local Christian populations, pilgrimages from the West, and the Byzantine Empire itself. The earliest initiative for the First Crusade began in 1095 when Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support from the Council of Piacenza in the empire's conflict with the Seljuk-led Turks. This was followed later in the year by the Council of Clermont, during which Pope Urban II supported the Byzantine request for military assistance and also urged faithful Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Miniature of Peter the Hermit leading the People's Crusade (Egerton 1500, Avignon, 14th-century)
Anatolian Seljuk horseman, in Varka and Golshah, mid-13th century miniature (detail), Konya, Sultanate of Rum.
Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont. Illustration from a copy of Sébastien Mamerot's Livre des Passages d'Outremer (Jean Colombe, c. 1472–75, BNF Fr. 5594)
An illustration showing the defeat of the People's Crusade, from Sébastien Mamerot's Livre des Passages d'Outre-mer (Jean Colombe, c. 1472–75, BNF Fr. 5594)
