William of Tyre

Also known as Guillaume de Tyr

Archbishop of Tyre, royal tutor to Baldwin IV, and the central narrative chronicler of the kingdom; his Historia is the indispensable source for the 12th-century Latin East.

William of Tyre was born in Jerusalem about 1130 of a Frankish settler family, studied for nearly twenty years in the schools of France and Italy, and returned to the Holy Land in 1165. King Amalric I, recognising both his learning and his loyalty, made him archdeacon of Tyre, royal envoy to Constantinople, tutor to the young prince Baldwin (whose leprosy William was the first to notice), and finally archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of the kingdom in 1175.

His Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, written between c. 1170 and his death around 1186, is by far the most important narrative source for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It is the work of an insider — William knew Amalric, Raymond III of Tripoli, Baldwin IV, and most of the great barons personally, and had access to the kingdom's archives — but also of a trained classical scholar with a sense of historical distance that is rare in medieval Latin chronicles.

The Historia ends abruptly in 1184. After William's death an Old French translation and continuation, generally known as the Eracles, took the story forward to the loss of Acre in 1291, and it is through that French translation rather than the original Latin that William's text reached its widest medieval audience.

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