In my portrayal of the mercenary captain, I may, like the chroniclers of old, be doing him a disservice — and if so, I apologize to his ghost, and to his descendants: he was certainly an effective soldier, much feared by the enemies of his lord, and a man who carried out the brutal tactics of the day with a ruthless efficiency. It is always a mistake to judge the actions of people in the past by the moral standards of the present: in the twenty-first century, Mercadier would doubtless be viewed as a war criminal — but then so too would Richard the Lionheart.