Guillaume de Forz

Guillaumes de Forz coat of arms

Guillaume de Forz , also de Fortibus or de Forts (English: William ; † 1195 ), was Lord of Fors and from the right of his wife Count of Aumale and Baron of Holderness .

Guillaume was lord of Fors in the Poitou (today in the Deux-Sèvres department ). He belonged to the immediate retinue of his liege lord, Richard the Lionheart . He is first mentioned in 1190 as a witness to a document by Richard, which was issued to the Jews of the city of Rouen . As part of Richard's patronage policy, he was married a little later to Countess Hawise von Aumale as her second husband. In June 1190, Guillaume was appointed in Chinon by King Richard the Lionheart, alongside Robert de Sablé and Richard de Camville , as one of the commanders of the fleet for the Third Crusade . While Sablé and Camville set sail immediately afterwards, he accompanied the king to Vézelay, where they met King Philip II of France on July 3 and officially announced the beginning of the crusade there. Then Guillaume set sail with his squadron consisting of 33 ships to circumnavigate the Iberian Peninsula . On July 24th he united in the mouth of the Tagus with Sablé and Camville, who had previously sacked Lisbon . United the fleet sailed on to Marseilles, where they received King Richard. In Sicily in 1191 he was one of the witnesses to the mutual assistance agreement between Richard and King Tankred of Sicily .

Guillaume died in 1195, his widow married Baudouin de Béthune a little later . With his wife he had a son who, after the loss of Aumale, continued the anglicised title of Count of Aumale :

• William de Forz († March 29, 1241)

literature

• KM Setton, HW Hazard, RL Wolff, NP Zacour, MW Baldwin: A History of the Crusades: The Later Crusades, 1189-1311 (University of Wisconsin, 2005)
• RV Turner: William de Forz, Count of Aumâle: An Early Thirteenth-Century English Baron , in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 115,3 (1971), pp. 221-249