William, the Catholic archbishop of Tyre, was himself born in the Levant, and wrote the longest and best of the Christian chronicles of the Crusader states. It has two chief concerns: the glory of the First Crusade, already legendary in William's time, and the history of his own time, during which he advised king Amaury and the leper king Baldwin in rounding out the Kingdom of Jerusalem and attempting to take Egypt, in which they were forestalled by Nur-eddin and Saladin, followed by Saladin's conquest of Syria. The book ends with Baldwin holding Saladin off at the Dead Sea, and William's expression of dismay at the situation of his country; he did not live to see the fall of Jerusalem. This edition is translated, introduced, and lightly annotated by François Guizot, later Prime Minister of France: one of the few historians to rule a country.