in Germany, but he never really succeeded in forming a party or gaining for himself a footing in the Empire during the lifetime of Frederick. With the extinction of the Hohenstaufen house in 1254 his chances were much improved, but shortly afterwards his death occurred on the 28th of January 1256 through his horse breaking through the ice during an obscure campaign among the Frisian marshes. William was more successful in his struggles with Margaret, countess of Flanders and Hainaut, known as “Black Meg.” She wished her succession to pass to the sons of her second marriage with William of Dampierre in preference to those of his first marriage with Bouchard of Avennes. But John of Avennes, her eldest son, had married William's sister Aleidis. William took up arms in defence of his brother-in-law's rights and Margaret was decisively beaten at West Kappel in 1253, and was compelled to acknowledge John of Avennes as her successor to the county of Hainaut.
See A. Ulrich, Geschichte des römischen Königs, Wilhelm von Holland (Hanover, 1882).
WILLIAM I. (d. 1166), king of Sicily, son of King Roger II. by Elvira of Castile, succeeded in 1154. His title “the Bad” seems little merited and expresses the bias of the historian Falcandus and the baronial class against the king and the official class by whom he was guided. It is obvious, however, that William was far inferior in character and energy to his father, and was attached to the semi-Moslem life of his gorgeous palaces of Palermo. The real power in the kingdom was at first exercised by Maio of Bari, a man of low birth, whose title ammiratus ammiratorum was the highest in the realm. Maio continued Roger's policy of excluding the nobles from the administration, and sought also to curtail the liberties of the towns. The barons, always chafing against the royal power, were encouraged to revolt by Pope Adrian IV., whose recognition William had not yet sought, by the Basileus Manuel and the emperor Frederick II. At the end of 1155 Greek troops recovered Bari and began to besiege Brindisi. William, however, was not devoid of military energy; landing in Italy he destroyed the Greek fleet and army at Brindisi (28th May 1156) and recovered Bari. Adrian came to terms at Benevento (18th June 1156), abandoned the rebels and confirmed William as king, and in 1158 peace was made with the Greeks. These diplomatic successes were probably due to Maio; on the other hand, the African dominions were lost to the Almohads (1156–1160), and it is possible that he advised their abandonment in face of the dangers threatening the kingdom down from the north. The policy of the minister led to a general conspiracy, and in November 1160 he was murdered in Palermo by Matthew Bonello, leader of the Sicilian nobles. For a while the king was in the hands of the conspirators, who purposed murdering or deposing him, but the people and the army rallied round him; he recovered power, crushed the Sicilian rebels, had Bonello blinded, and in a short campaign reduced the rest of the Regno. Thus freed from feudal revolts, William confided the government to men trained in Maio's school, such as the grand notary, Matthew d'Agello. His latter years were peaceful; he was now the champion of the true pope against the emperor, and Alexander III. was installed in the Lateran in November 1165 by a guard of Normans. William died on the 7th of May 1166. (E. Cu.)
WILLIAM II. (d. 1189), king of Sicily, was only thirteen years old at the death of his father William I. when he was placed under the regency of his mother, Marguerite of Navarre. Until the king came of age in 1171 the government was controlled first by the chancellor Stephen of Perche, cousin of Marguerite (1166-1168), and then by Walter Ophamil, archbishop of Palermo, and Matthew d'Ajello, the vice-chancellor. William's character is very indistinct. Lacking in military enterprise, secluded and pleasure-loving, he seldom emerged from his palace life at Palermo. Yet his reign is marked by an ambitious foreign policy and a vigorous diplomacy. Champion of the papacy and in secret league with the Lombard cities he was able to defy the common enemy, Frederick II. In 1174 and 1175 he made treaties with Genoa and Venice and his marriage in February 1177 with Joan, daughter of Henry II. of England, marks his high position in European politics. To secure peace with the emperor he sanctioned the marriage of his aunt Constance, daughter of Roger II., with Frederick's son Henry, afterwards the emperor Henry VI., causing a general oath to be taken to her as his successor in case of his death without heirs. This step, fatal to the Norman kingdom, was possibly taken that William might devote himself to foreign conquests.[1]
Unable to revive the African dominion, William directed his attack on Egypt, from which Saladin threatened the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. In July 1174, 50,000 men were landed before Alexandria, but Saladin's arrival forced the Sicilians to re-embark in disorder. A better prospect opened in the confusion in Byzantine affairs which followed the death of Manuel Comnenus (1180), and William took up the old design and feud against Constantinople. Durazzo was captured (11th June 1185) and in August Thessalonica surrendered to the joint attack of the Sicilian fleet and army. The troops then marched upon the capital, but the troop of the emperor Isaac Angelus overthrew the invaders on the banks of the Strymon (7th Sept. 1185). Thessalonica was at once abandoned and in 1189 William made peace with Isaac, abandoning all the conquests. He was now planning to induce the crusading armies of the West to pass through his territories, and seemed about to play a leading part in the third Crusade. His admiral Margarito, a naval genius equal to George of Antioch, with 600 vessels kept the eastern Mediterranean open for the Franks, and forced the all-victorious Saladin to retire from before Tripoli in the spring of 1188. In November 1189 William died, leaving no children. His title of “the Good” is due perhaps less to his character than to the cessation of internal troubles in his reign. The “Voyage” of Ibn-Giobair, a traveller in Sicily in 1183-1185, shows William surrounded by Moslem women and eunuchs, speaking and reading Arabic and living like “a Moslem king.” (E. Cu.)
WILLIAM I. [Friedrich Karl] (1781–1864), king of Württemberg, son of Frederick, afterwards King Frederick I. of Württemberg, was born at Lüben in Silesia on the 27th of September 1781. In his early days he was debarred from public life owing to a quarrel with his father, whose time-serving deference to Napoleon was distasteful to him. In 1814-1815 he suddenly rose into prominence through the Wars of Liberation against France, in which he commanded an army corps with no little credit to himself. On his accession to the throne of Württemberg in 1816 he realized the expectations formed of him as a liberal-minded ruler by promulgating a constitution (1819), under which serfdom and obsolete class privileges were swept away, and by issuing ordinances which greatly assisted the financial and industrial development and the educational progress of his country. In 1848 he sought to disarm the revolutionary movement by a series of further liberal reforms which removed the restrictions more recently imposed at Metternich's instance by the Germanic diet. But his relations with the legislature, which had from time to time become strained owing to the bureaucratic spirit which he kept alive in the administration, were definitely broken off in consequence of a prolonged conflict on questions of Germanic policy. He cut the knot by repudiating the enactments of 1848–1849 and by summoning a packed parliament (1851), which re-enforced the code of 1819.
The same difficulties which beset William as a constitutional reformer impeded him as a champion of Germanic union. Intent above all on preserving the rights of the Middle Germanic states against encroachments by Austria and Prussia he lapsed into a policy of mere obstruction. The protests which he made in 1820–1823 against Metternich's policy of making the minor German states subservient to Austria met with less success than they perhaps deserved. In 1849–1850 he made a firm stand against the proposals for a Germanic union propounded in the National Parliament at Frankfort, for fear lest the exaltation of Prussia should eclipse the lesser principalities. Though forced to accede to the proffering of the imperial crown to the king of Prussia, he joined heartily in Prince Schwarzenberg's schemes for undoing the work of the National Parliament, and by means of
- ↑ Chalandon, La Domination normande, ii. 389.
