Eustace The Monk Who Became a Pirate And Inspired The Figure of Robin Hood

Every good comic book fan will have read some of the adventures of Corto Maltés and if so, will remember that one of the characters that the protagonist had to deal with in that first and germinal story that was The Ballad of the Salty Sea is the Monk, the chief of the pirates of the South Seas; a mysterious individual, who lives on his own island and whose identity is unknown because he is always hooded. At the end it is revealed who he is, but what interests us here is that this character is inspired by a real one, who lived in the Middle Ages dedicated to the Corsican despite his noble origin and whose thousand adventures inspired the legendary figure of Robin Hood— Eustace the Monk. A medieval battle, circa last quarter of the 13th century or 1st quarter of the 14th century. Eustace’s real name was Eustache Busket, born around 1170 in Courset, in the French county of Boulogne, a territory born of the pagus Bononiensis, dependent on the civitas de Morins (a pagus was the equivalent of a tribe, a Roman administrative unit of lower rank to the civitas , this being a community formed by several pagus ), which from the end of the 9th century was under the control of the county of Flanders. There lived Baudoin Busket, feudal lord and father of Eustache. This was his youngest son, so, according to the custom of the time, he was destined for a religious profession while the first-born would inherit the fiefdom. Eustace entered the Benedictine order, joining the community of monks at the Abbey of Saint-Wulmer de Samer, also known as Saint-Vilmer, a monastery founded in the 7th century in Pas-de-Calais that used to be the traditional burial place of the Counts of Boulogne. He did not last long there because he abandoned monastic life in 1190 to try to avenge his father's death.