She got the sailing/taking-local boats-instead-of-flying notion into my head, the eating local food instead of pizza and burgers one and countless more from sleeping rough, to 80-hour bus rides, to learning immensities of patience, to tolerating people you’d prefer to kill, to learning the local language everywhere you go. She’d done it all herself and had learned how to make her money last, and how to make the travel and the destination the real experience (long before that became a cliche). And she was pervy. I had to respect her. Given his illness, however, and the certainty that he would not sire a successor, the most pressing business of the Kingdom was the marriage of Baldwin’s heir, his older sister Sibylla. In fact, Tripoli had already arranged a marriage for her with William de Montferrat, a man from a powerful north Italian family. Unfortunately, William died in the summer of 1177, leaving Sibylla pregnant at 17.
Comments