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Guillaume I er de Provence said the Liberator, born around 955 and died at Avignon in 994 , after August 29[1], was a Provencal nobleman, famous for having defeated and driven out the
Saracens of Provence in 973.
William I of Provence
Title of nobility
Count of Provence
Biography
Birth
Toward 955
Death
After 29 Aug 993
Avignon
Activity
Monarch
Family
Bosonids
Father
Boson II of Arles
Mother
Constance
Siblings
Rotboald I of Provence
Spouses
Adélaïde d'Anjou
Arsinde de Comminges
Children
Constance d'Arles
Odile de Provence
Guillaume II de Provence
Toda, countess of Besalú
Son of Boson II , Count of Arles and Constance de Provence , he was successively Count of Avignon (962), Count of Provence (972), Marquis of Arles Provence (979) and Prince of all Provence (991) [2] . Due to an uncle also called William [3] , he is sometimes referred to as William II of Provence.
Biography
His early years
Guillaume and his older brother Roubaud (aka Rotbold II), succeeded their father Boson and uncle also called Guillaume between 962 and 966 . The county of Provence belongs to them in joint possession, Guillaume becoming count of Avignon and Roubaud count of Arles following the division in the previous generation between their father and uncle. He married between 968 and April 970 [4] , Arsinde de Comminges [ 5 ] , daughter of Arnaud, count of Comminges and d'Arsinde de Carcassonne. Arsinde, his first wife, has sometimes been confused with Adelaide, his second, but that controversy is now over[6] . From this first union would be born:
Odile de Provence known as Odile de Nice (c. 976-c. 1032)
Arsinde
Ermengarde
The liberation of Provence and its consequences
Following the removal of the Abbot Mayeul in July 972 by bands of Saracens installed in the Maures mountain range since the end of the IXth century, Count William and his brother Roubaud took the lead in reinforcing Provencal lost by the troops of Ardouin, count of Turin.
They track down the Moors whom they crush at the battle of Tourtour in 973, then drive them out of Provence [7] . In September 983[8], Guillaume annihilated the Saracens on their return from a campaign in the Alps and his brother
Roubaud retired from Freinet with the help of Ardouin Marquis of Turin [ 9 ] . This military campaign against the Saracens, conducted without Conrad's troops, is in fact coupled with a feudalization of Provence, of the local aristocracy and of the urban and peasant communities who had until then always refused the feudal mutation and the count's power. . This allowed William to obtain the de facto suzerainty of Provence and with the royal consent, to control the tax authorities of Provence. He distributed the reconquered lands to his vassals, such as the territory of Hyères to to the lords of Fos, arbitrated the differences of various
individuals and created Provençal feudalism [10]. With Isarn, bishop of Grenoble , he undertook to repopulate the Dauphiné and authorized an Italian count named Ugo Blavia to settle near Fréjus in the early 970s to put the land back into cultivation.
His government and his fame
Like his father Boson, Guillaume was advised by a viscount who, from 977, accompanied him on all these trips [11] and he relied on a large group of judges to dispense justice [12] . Having become Marquis of Provence in 979 , he moved to Arles in the early 980s . When his first wife Arsinde de Comminges (c. 950-983) died, he married in 984 in this city, against the advice of the pope, Adelaide of Anjou who had just separated from her husband, the future king of France, Louis V. The couple had at least two children:
William II of Provence (c.981-av.May 30, 1018) [ 13 ]
Constance d'Arles ( 986 - 1032 ) queen of France by her marriage to Robert II around the year 1000 ,
Adelaide
and another Ermengarde daughter of Arles , whose parentage is more disputed [14] ; Ermengarde Arles wife later Robert I st Auvergne .
For all this, he is an important character in the chronicles of Raoul Glaber who treats him as a duke and he appears in a charter of 992 with the name of pater patriae .
The end of his life
At the end of his life, Guillaume became very pious and returned many goods to the Church's temporal. Already in 991 [15] , at the request of the bishop of Fréjus , Riculf [16], who implored the prince to make restitution of the former domains of the bishopric, Guillaume acceded to this petition and granted him in addition the half of Fréjus and the village of Puget [17]. In 992 , he also returned important estates in the Camargue to the Saint-Jean d'Arles monastery. In 993, near the end of his life, in the city of Avignon of which he was the count, he took the habit of a monk and appealed to the Abbot Mayeul to relieve his soul. He made restitutions and offerings to the abbey of Cluny [2], and was surrounded by a multitude of his subjects when Guillaume de Provence died, shortly after the 29 Aug 993. Before dying, he expressed the wish to be buried in Sarrians, near Carpentras, in the priory under construction on the villa offered to the Burgundian abbey [ 18 ] .
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955 - 993 (38 years)
[1, 2, 3, 4] 
