William of Orange

 As I have discussed previously, medieval people loved epic tales.  Although there had been epics written in classical antiquity (the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, the Latin Aeneid), epic was re-invented in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  Most famous of the medieval epics is doubtless the Song of Roland, but there were plenty of others, including the cycle of epics about William of Orange.

William was a real person, although there is only a slight overlap between the historical William, who died at the beginning of the ninth century, and the William of the epics.  The historical William, a rough contemporary of Charlemagne, was a powerful lord of southern France, of a family that for a while acted as rivals to the Carolingian dynasty.  His grandson ended up as a hostage at the royal court, and let's just say that story doesn't end well.  The real William founded the monastery of Gellone, and when he grew old he retired there.

During his time, southern France had a number of Saracen settlements; the Mediterranean was mostly controlled by Muslims, not by Christians.  This real feature of the eighth-ninth centuries was one of the few realistic elements that made it into the epics.

The epics starring William were supposedly set in the time of Charlemagne, although everything about the castles, the armors, and the culture of the people in the stories was a slightly larger-than-life version of aristocratic life in the twelfth century.  In the epics, William fights the Saracens, converts a Muslim princess to Christianity and marries her, and at the end of his life becomes a monk at Gellone.

The stories were told both as entertainment and as a commentary on the author's own twelfth century.  The same thing is true today, when authors bring into historical fiction points that they want to make about their society:  one will notice for example that a lot of women have written a lot of historical novels about queens of England.

In the case of William of Orange, much of the entertainment value was provided by big battle scenes.  The author drove a path of destruction through armies on both sides.  This person is beheaded, that person has his brains knocked out, the other person has a spear driven all the way through his body.  One assumes the audience loved it.

The stories also routinely portray priests and bishops as weak hypocrites.  Knights and great secular lords were more than a match for these fellows, the author seems to be saying.

But there was also a strong critique of knighthood in these epics.  William was portrayed as huge, ferocious, a terrific fighter, and yet also ridiculous.  When he becomes a monk, he is very bad at it, to the extent that the other monks want to drive him out.  As he faces Saracens, he keeps saying, "We're all going to die!"  It usually takes a woman to save the day, and for a twelfth-century male audience, having to be saved by a woman added to the humiliation.  Good times.

If you'd like to see these epics, they are translated as Guillaume d'Orange by Joan M. Ferrante.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval knights and epics, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.