Shortly after he died, William’s eldest son, also called William, commissioned a chronicler to write his father’s life story as a poem. It has survived in its original Old French, has been translated into English, and runs to over nineteen thousand lines. It is known as the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, or “History of William Marshal.” In the Middle Ages, a “histoire” was both a history and a story—a tale that blended truth and fiction, rather like a historical novel today. In the case of the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, the truth forms a solid backbone but tends to big up its hero and gloss over the moments that were perhaps not quite so heroic. However, it still gives us an insight into the world of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and presents us with William Marshal as he desired to be seen for posterity—some of the edges smoothed, but nevertheless remaining vibrant and three-dimensional. When this portrait is added to the known material, including his charters and documents, a powerful overall picture of the man emerges…but not of his time in the Holy Land.
Of the 19,215 lines in the Histoire, only twenty-four of them concern his time in Outremer (a medieval term for the Holy Land, meaning “the land beyond the sea”). The lines tell us nothing specific about what he did, and part of that narrative is historically inaccurate. The Histoire tells us that William took his leave of King Guy, his knights, the Templars and Hospitallers, who were all disappointed to see him go home because of his fine qualities. The problem is that when William left the Holy Land, Guy de Lusignan (who had been his enemy in Poitou) was not yet king. William was back in Normandy by February 1186, and Guy did not become king of Jerusalem until seven months later. So, there is some fudging going on—either because of lack of information, or because what happened in the Holy Land stayed in the Holy Land. The writer of the Histoire confesses that although William performed “many fine deeds,” he does not know what they were because “I was not there, and I did not witness them.” Nor can he find anyone who can tell him what they were.
The main thing we know about William’s time in Outremer is that he obtained his own burial silks (the inspiration for this novel and its title), very possibly from the Templars. On his deathbed, William sent his dear friend and former squire Jean D’Earley to Wales, to retrieve the pieces of silk from storage and bring them to him. When Jean returned, William had the pieces laid out on his bed to show to his retainers and family. Only now did he tell them that he had had them for over thirty years and had always intended them to be draped over his body when he died. He also added that while in Outremer, he had given his body to be buried by the Templars wherever and whenever he should die. Professor David Crouch, senior authority on the marshals, believes that William must have felt that his life was in serious peril at some point during his time in Outremer and that he made his will and involved the Templars in it. I believe it is no coincidence that in the Histoire he reveals the pieces of silk to his eldest son and his inner circle of knights immediately preceding the information that he desires to be buried by the Templars. I suspect that the cloths were his covenant with the order—a symbol of the pledge he took to them in Outremer.
A year before William was ordained into the Templars on his deathbed, he had had a Templar mantle made and kept it just as well hidden as his silk cloths. The mantle symbolized his entry into the Templar order and a farewell to all things secular. The silk shrouds were his farewell to the world, to be displayed as he was borne to his grave (unless bad weather intervened, in which case they were to be covered and protected by plain gray cloth). Even stored away for three decades, those lengths of silk were highly important to William.
What did the silks look like?
Again, we don’t know, only that they were very fine and of choice cloth sufficient to cover William’s body and his bier. We don’t know if they were patterned or colored. There is a very famous white silk that was made in the city of Tire. Known as tafeth, it was “exported thence to all parts, being extremely fine and well woven beyond compare.” Some white silks were woven with a pattern, and there are samples to be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of medieval textiles. From slightly later, textile historian Maria Hayward tells us about the medieval pall and that it was a rectangular cloth, often with a central cross of a different fabric, prominent from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. John Duke of Bedford had a pall of red velvet with a red satin cross and decorated with his badge. William Marshal’s cloths could well have been a precursor to these later sumptuous decorations.
Templar Silks is itself a “histoire”—a work of history and fiction. We know that William Marshal departed for the Holy Land on pilgrimage at some point in the high summer or autumn of 1183, following the death of his lord Henry the Young King from dysentery, but we do not know his method of travel. Some historians state that he traveled by sea (which was becoming popular but hadn’t reached its heyday), but that lies in the realms of conjecture; he could just as easily have taken the overland route, especially since this would allow him to rack up indulgences along the way (a sort of points system for entry into heaven: the more indulgences you had, the less time you had to spend in purgatory). I sent William overland, via the area controlled by the kingdom of Sicily, which included Apulia and the port of Brindisi, because Henry II’s daughter, the Young King’s sister, was queen of those lands, and I felt that William may well have taken that route and would have been assured of safe passage.
Constantinople in 1183 was in a state of turmoil. The previous year, there had been a massacre of the Latin Christians, and although a new Latin church was being built in reparation and some mea culpa noises had been made, the situation was unstable. However, there was the attraction of the great church of Hagia Sophia, with its magnificent mosaic of the Virgin Mary. Alienor of Aquitaine, the Young King’s mother, had sojourned in Constantinople during the Second Crusade and may have filled her eldest son with visions of the wonders she had seen there, so I had my reasons for sending William by that road.
Further researching William’s potential journey to Outremer, I reasoned that he must have been accompanied by a small entourage, including men who were known to have been in the Young King’s affinity or who were beholden to William and may have been on the witness list of some of his early charters. William would not have set out alone, and by the circumstances of his vow must, I suspect, have traveled with others known to his young lord and seeking to redeem their souls. I have also sent William’s brother Ancel with him. We know Ancel was with William at the tourney of Lagny sur Marne in 1179, and I think it likely that he would have accompanied William to the Holy Land. He was a younger son who would have had to make his way as best he could, and being a part of William’s entourage after 1179 would seem a likely choice. The only other reference to Ancel in history, apart from Lagny, is in a charter he witnesses for the Count of Perche, a Marshal cousin, in 1189. In The Greatest Knight, I sent him off to Perche after the tourney of Lagny, but I now believe he accompanied William to Jerusalem. What happened to him there is the speculative part of my “histoire,” based on my alternative researches with Akashic consultant Alison King, and at the end of his adventures, he is back at Perche.
The situation William found on arriving in Jerusalem is as written in conventional history. King Baldwin IV, in his early twenties, was slowly dying of leprosy and the vultures were gathering. His sister Sybilla was married to Guy de Lusignan, a Poitevan incomer who one chronicler claims had been banished from court by Henry II for the murder of Patrick Earl of Salisbury, who was William Marshal’s uncle. Whether Guy’s was the hand on the spear is open to debate, but certainly his family were responsible for Patrick’s murder, and there was no love lost between Guy and William, even if they were not outright enemies.
Guy had been appointed regent of the kingdom of Jerusalem, but the established colonists would not unite behind him and considered him arrogant and inept. His little stepson, Baldwin, was heir to the throne, and t
he main power struggle was over who was going to rule in the child’s stead when King Baldwin died.
To this end, a deputation was sent to Europe seeking help and led by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem. The envoys set out in the summer of 1184, and I think it more than likely that William had a hand in the preparations because he had so recently come from Henry II’s court and had served the Angevin hierarchy for at least fifteen years. He also had excellent contacts within the courts of northern Europe and was known to Philippe of France. Patriarch Heraclius has often come in for a bad press from film, novel, and historical writing. He’s seen as a worldly prelate, too concerned with his perfumes, rich clothes, and, of course, his mistress, Paschia de Riveri, to be spiritual. It has to be said that much of what is written about him comes from the pen of one of his main rivals, William of Tire, so needs to be read judiciously. To me, he came across as an affable, urbane, and reasonable sort of man, one who enjoyed his pleasures most certainly, but one with humanity and a concern both for Jerusalem and the welfare of his fellow man. He was responsible in consultation for helping to negotiate the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin without a bloodbath in the aftermath of the disastrous battle of Hattin, after Guy de Lusignan led the Christian army of Jerusalem to its destruction. He was to die during the siege of Acre in the winter of 1190/91, as did Sybilla, queen of Jerusalem, and her two daughters.
William’s affair with Paschia de Riveri is conjectural on my behalf, but it’s certainly not a wild flight of fantasy, and it’s one of the reasons historical fiction exists—to explore the “what if” and “who knows.” William was once accused of having an affair with the Young King’s wife, Marguerite. I do not think he did, but he must have had a certain reputation with the ladies for that accusation to be given credence in the wider court, and the marshal’s department was responsible for policing the concubines and whores who populated that court. It has also been revealed recently that William may have had an illegitimate son. David Crouch, in his revised edition of William’s biography, explores that possibility, brought to light by evidence in the marshal charters of a certain Gilbert Marshal of Mundham who Professor Crouch thinks likely to have been William’s son, born out of wedlock. Add to that the ten legitimate children William and Isabelle de Clare had between them, and one finds a man who enjoyed the physical company of women.
What we know in history about Paschia de Riveri is that she was a draper’s widow from Nablus. Heraclius was in the habit of buying her services from her husband whenever he wanted her company and would then hand her back to her family in the interim. After her husband died, she became Heraclius’s full-time mistress. She is portrayed as parading around Jerusalem with her household, dressed in jewels and silks, and because of her influence on the patriarch, was known as “la patriarchess.” They had at least one daughter, but we don’t know her name or date of birth, only that Heraclius was in a meeting one day when an excited servant came flying in to shout the news to all and sundry that the “patriarchess” had borne him a daughter!
Given Paschia’s circumstances and the convoluted dealings at the court of Jerusalem, I thought it not unlikely that Mafia-like business was the norm and sex, money, and power were at the root of all scheming, even as they are today. If William became caught up in it, then I feel it taught him valuable lessons that would stand him in good stead in later life. He learned the worst so that he could be the best. Although we know Heraclius’s end from history, we do not know what happened to Paschia de Riveri or their daughter. All we know about her is what I have reported in the paragraph above.
While researching the marshal’s role in the kingdom of Jerusalem, it became clear that it was more concerned with horses, harness, and stabling than in the Angevin realms. This was an integral part of the marshal’s duties in England and Normandy, but the position had a wider and more important role, whereas in the Holy Land the horse care and equipment element was still pivotal to the marshal’s position and duty, hence William’s involvement at that level during his time there.
As a final note, I was fascinated by how powerful William’s dedication to the Virgin Mary seems to have been. I suspect that robbing the shrine at Rocamadour had an enormous effect on him. As a medieval man, he would truly have believed he was going to hell for what he had done, and perhaps his young lord too, who had died in agony before his eyes. In making his vow to the Templars, both as a secular knight and then a full brother in his last days, William would have been vowing himself to God and the Virgin. His foundation at Cartmel is dedicated to the warrior Saint Michael and the Virgin. His chapel at Caversham is dedicated to the Virgin (it had a wonderful jeweled statue of the Virgin dating to this period, which is now lost) as is Tintern de Voto in Ireland and the church of Saint Mary’s in New Ross, among others. Devotion to the Virgin is an especially English phenomenon in the twelfth century, but William Marshal appears to have been particularly fervent. There is no overt indication of this in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, but I consider it to be one of those personal things, so much a part of him that it went without saying, under our noses if we care to look.
Select Bibliography
For anyone wishing to read further on the subjects covered in the novel, here are just a few of the books I found useful during my research. For any readers interested in viewing my full research library, it can be found at elizabethchadwick.com/my-reference-library.
Barber, Malcolm, and Keith Bate. The Templars: Selected Sources Translated and Annotated. Manchester, United Kingdom: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Benvenisti, Meron. The Crusaders in the Holy Land. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Macmillan, 1972.
Biddle, Martin, Gideon Avni, Jon Seligman, and Tamar Winter. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. New York: Rizzoli, 2000.
Boas, Adrian J. Archaeology of the Military Orders. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2006.
———. Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2001.
Crouch, David. The Acts and Letters of the Marshal Family: Marshals of England and Earls of Pembroke 1145–1248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2015.
William Marshal, Third Edition. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2016.
Drake Boehm, Barbara, and Melanie Holcomb. Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People under Heaven. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016.
Hamilton, Bernard. The Leper King and His Heirs: Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hillenbrand, Carole. The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Hodgson, Natasha R. Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative. Suffolk, United Kingdom: Boydell, 2007.
Holden, A. J., ed. History of William Marshal, with English translation by S. Gregory and historical notes by D. Crouch, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford, United Kingdom: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002.
Kedar, Benjamin Z., et. al., eds. Crusades, Volume 12. Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2013.
Mitchell, Piers D. Medicine in the Crusades and the Medieval Surgeon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Phillips, Jonathan. The Crusades 1095–1204. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2014.
Richards, D. S., trans. The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh Part 2. Farnham, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2007.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ed. The Atlas of the Crusades. East Sussex, United Kingdom: Guild Publishing, 1991.
Upton-Ward, J. M. The Rule of the Templars. Suffolk, United Kingdom: Boydell Press, 1992.
Wilkinson, John, Joyce Hill, and W. F. Ryan, eds. Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099–1185. London: Hakluyt Society, 1988.
William of Tire (Archbishop). A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: R. P. Pryne, 2014.
I also
wish to thank my dear friend and colleague Alison King for helping me to access the peoples of the past via her extraordinary psychic talent.
Acknowledgments
This is the page where I express my gratitude to everyone who has been there for me while I have been writing Templar Silks.
My thanks to my former editor at Sphere, Rebecca Saunders, with whom I first discussed the idea of a novel about William Marshal’s pilgrimage. This being the United States edition of Templar Silks, I would like to thank my excellent U.S. editor, Shana Drehs, and the team at Sourcebooks for their vision and perception.
I also want to express my gratitude to everyone at the Blake Friedmann literary agency: my agent, Isobel Dixon, as well as Julian Friedmann, Hattie Grunwald, and the lovely people in the contracts department and behind the scenes who make sure all runs smoothly, especially Sam Hodder and Emanuela Anechoum, who deal with my rants about overseas tax forms!
I need to thank Simon Hicks and Kimberley Gardner, people very dear to my heart, who also happen to be amazing emergency and critical care nurses. They were extremely helpful in talking to me about the difficulties Ancel would have faced after receiving his injury and in detailing to me the best- and worst-case scenarios. Any errors of judgment and misinterpretation are mine alone.
Thank you to my husband, Roger—for those who have read my acknowledgments down the years, yes, he is still making me mugs of tea, doing the ironing, and being my stalwart support ship and research assistant. And also, huge appreciation to my dear friend Alison King for friendship, long conversations over all kinds of beverages, and for continuing wonderful adventures in time travel.
Thank you also to my many Facebook friends and readers. There are too many of you to mention without upping the word count to the point of giving my editor a heart attack, but you bring joy and normality to my day.
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