been commissioned by Amalric is a typical ancient and medieval topos, or literary theme, in which a wise ruler, a lover of history and literature, wishes to preserve for posterity the grand deeds of his reign. William's claims of impartiality are also a typical topos in ancient and medieval historical writing. His depiction of Baldwin IV as a hero is an attempt "to vindicate the politics of his own party and to blacken those of its opponents." As mentioned above, William was opposed to Baldwin's mother Agnes of Courtenay, Patriarch Heraclius, and their supporters; his interpretation of events during Baldwin's reign was previously taken as fact almost without question. In the mid twentieth century, Marshall W. Baldwin, Steven Runciman, and Hans Eberhard Mayer were influential in perpetuating this point of view, although the more recent re-evaluations of this period by Vessey, Peter Edbury and Bernard Hamilton have undone much of William's influence. An often-noted flaw in the Historia is William's poor memory for dates. "Chronology is sometimes confused, and dates are given wrongly", even for basic information such as the regnal dates of the kings of Jerusalem. For example, William gives the date of Amalric's death as 11 July 1173, when it actually occurred in 1174. Despite his biases and errors, William "has always been considered one of the greatest medieval writers." Runciman wrote that "he had a broad vision; he understood the significance of the great events of his time and the sequence of cause and effect in history." Christopher Tyerman calls him "the historian's historian", and "the greatest crusade historian of all," and Bernard Hamilton says he "is justly considered one of the finest historians of the Middle Ages". As the Dictionary of the Middle Ages says, "William's achievements in assembling and evaluating sources, and in writing in excellent and original Latin a critical and judicious (if chronologically faulty) narrative, make him an outstanding historian, superior by medieval, and not inferior by modern, standards of scholarship." References Sources Primary William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. E.A. Babcock and A.C. Krey. Columbia University Press, 1943. Secondary John Carl Andressohn, The Ancestry and Life of Godfrey of Bouillon. Indiana University Publications, Social Science Series 5, 1947. Susan M. Babbitt, "William of Tyre." Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989, vol. 12. Marshall W. Baldwin, "The Decline and