ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns what happened in the 1120s, how William's story was developed, first by his French translator, and then by later editors and copyists of that translation. William of Tyre gave an account of the origins of the Templars. William laid down his pen in 1184, having provided his readers with an account of the crusading movement and the Latin principalities in the east down to his own day. Almost immediately afterwards, Saladin's victories destroyed the achievements that William had chronicled. The Third Crusade then failed to regain Jerusalem, and in the decades that followed, there were to be several more crusades preached in western Europe. It was against this background of heightened awareness of Christian failure and the weakness of the Christian position in the Levant that someone translated William's text into French, thereby making it available to a lay audience.
