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When Wilhelm left for his adventurous journey, he commanded Flemish, French and Latin, as well as Arabic. His chivalrous manners and manners must have been impeccable, for we find him in the highest circles around King Louis IX. from France as a welcome guest. When he left, the queen gave him a richly decorated Psalter. In 1248 he traveled in the wake of Louis IX. to the Holy Land. Four years later we find him in Akkon, where the Franciscans had a monastery.

On May 7, 1253 left Wilhelm on a two-masted Byzantine merchant ship Constantinople. A strong south-westerly wind blew, so that the destination, the peninsula of Crimea, could be reached directly with a good drive. He stands at the prow, a handsome man in the brown habit of the Franciscans; the spray foams, but William's gaze does not focus on the horizon, he rather wanders off into nothingness. He mentally goes through his travel arrangements again: were they sufficient, could he have done something better, or did he even forget something?

Everything he read had been re-studied: reports from Georgia and Hungary on the Mongol invasion, various sources on the Priest-King John, the Alexander novel, and the works of the seventh-century polymath Isidore of Seville, whose work also includes the writings of the Greeks Solinus on "India" contained.

Fortunately for him, he had met Balduin of Hainaut and Andreas of Longjumeau for detailed talks, and they both told him something about everyday Mongolian life. No, his forerunners had not found a Hellmouth from which the equestrian armies came forth, saw no monsters, and found no people to cover themselves with their own huge ears. But they had no clue as to where the kingdom of the Christian priest-king was in the East.

He had always been skeptical when the accounts contained anything too whimsical, and he always disbelieving in the popular word equations: Tartarius = Tartarus, Mönke = Magog, Mongol = Magogoli. He had had the diplomatic note of his king translated into Turkish and Arabic, and in addition Emperor Baldwin II of Consantinople had given him a letter of recommendation. The fact that he did not have to travel alone also strengthened his confidence, the Friar Bartholomew of Cremona and Gosset accompanied him as well as a servant and an interpreter. He had absolutely no doubt about the correctness of his faith; he hoped to convert and baptize many.