Count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine (1086-1126), and one of the leaders of the Crusade of 1101.
At the age of fifteen, William succeeded to a vast inheritance stretching from the Loire to the Pyrenees and from the Auvergne to the Atlantic. As such, he was one of the two or three most powerful princes in the France of his day, and marriage ties linked his family with the royal houses of England, France (he was the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine), and Aragon. As the author of ten or eleven short compositions in Occitan that stand as the oldest surviving vernacular poems in the tradition of courtly love, he is regarded today as one of the famous poets (“William the Troubadour”) of medieval literary history. Having failed to take part in the First Crusade (1096-1099), for reasons not fully understood, William had a leading part in the organization and execution of the abortive Crusade of 1101 from its very outset.
The principal source of information on William, Orderic Vitalis, tells how he helped recruit the Aquitanian contingent in the crusader army as well as leading the march overland through Hungary to Constantinople. William also figured prominently in a confused confrontation with the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos after the crusaders had crossed into Asia Minor. He commanded the Aquitanian army in the decisive battle of Herakleia (mod. Eregli, Turkey) in southeastern Anatolia in late August or early September 1101. In this battle, the Turkish army of the Saljuq sultan Qilij Arslan I routed the crusaders and brought the campaign to a premature end. William and a handful of his men managed to elude the victors, hid in the surrounding countryside, and eventually reached safety in Tarsos (mod. Tarsus, Turkey) and Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey). After visiting Jerusalem, William returned home in 1102. Orderic Vitalis, as well as other contemporary historians, most notably Albert of Aachen, Ekkehard of Aura, Fulcher of Chartres, and Matthew of Edessa, leave no doubt that William’s narrow escape from death at Herakleia was a harrowing experience that left him deeply shaken.
William remained in his French domains for almost twenty years, but in 1119-1120 he joined Alfonso I, king of Aragon, in a campaign against the Almoravid rulers of southern Spain. He fought at the major victory gained by the Christians at Cutanda near Zaragoza (17 June 1120). William’s second son, Raymond of Poitiers, succeeded to the principality of Antioch through marriage to Constance, daughter of Prince Bohemund II.
-George T. Beech
Bibliography
Beech, George T., “The Ventures of the Dukes of Aquitaine into Spain and the Crusader East in the Early Twelfth Century,” Haskins Society Journal 5 (1993), 61-75.
-, “The Crusade of 1101,” in A History of the Crusades,
Ed. Kenneth M. Setton et al., 6 vols., 2d ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969-1989), 1: 343-367.
World History
