Bohemond I

Prince of Antioch

• Born: c. 1052
• Birthplace: Somewhere in what is now southern Italy
• Died: March 7, 1111
• Place of death: Canossa, Apulia (now Canosa di Puglia, Italy)

Bohemond was one of the leaders of Europe's most successful Crusade to the Holy Land and the founder and first prince of Antioch.

Early Life

Bohemond I (BOH-uh-muhnd) was the firstborn son of Robert Guiscard, the most successful of that small band of eleventh century Norman adventurers who reclaimed southern Italy and Sicily from Byzantine, Italian, and Muslim forces. By the time of his death in 1085, Guiscard had become duke of Apulia and Calabria, overlord of Sicily (then being subdued by his younger brother Roger), and vassal, ally, and protector of the pope.

Guiscard's first wife, a Norman woman named Alberada, gave birth to their son Bohemond in the early 1050', perhaps 1052. While Bohemond was still a small boy, Guiscard had his marriage to Alberada annulled so that he could make a more advantageous union with Sigelgaita, sister of the prince of Salerno. Little else is known about Bohemond's early years, except that he probably learned to read and write Latin and that he certainly learned the art of war as his father's apprentice. Bohemond grew to be a very tall, broad-shouldered, muscular man with a slightly stooped carriage. He had fair skin, yellow hair, and blue-gray eyes.

In 1081, Guiscard and Bohemond attempted the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, which then dominated the southern Balkans and Greece. On the eve of the invasion, Bohemond's stepmother deprived him of his inheritance as firstborn by persuading Guiscard to name the eldest of their three sons, Bohemond's half brother Roger, heir to the duchy. Had the conquest of the Byzantine Empire succeeded, Bohemond's inheritance probably would have come out of the spoils.

The invasion began well. Bohemond, who was then about twenty and already skilled enough to be second in command, secured a beachhead by conquering Avlona, participated in the successful sieges of Corfu and Durazzo, and defeated Byzantine armies in the field. Meanwhile, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus encouraged his German allies to invade Italy and Guiscard's ever-restive barons in southern Italy to rebel. Because the Normans had insufficient monies and troops to handle all the conflicts simultaneously, they withdrew to Italy in late 1083.

In October, 1084, the Normans invaded again. Their initial successes were followed by an outbreak of disease in their camp. Bohemond became ill and returned to Italy to recuperate. Before he could return to the war in the summer of 1085, his father died, and his half brother Roger, the new duke, called off the invasion and brought the troops home.

Bohemond declared war on Duke Roger in order to win from him a share of the patrimony from which he had been excluded. By 1090, Bohemond had seized most of Apulia (the heel of Italy), including important towns such as Taranto and Bari. What chiefly prevented him from conquering more was intervention by his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, whose own advantage lay in keeping southern Italy divided between his nephews.

Thwarted by his uncle and half brother, Bohemond found an outlet for his acquisitiveness and bellicose energy when Pope Urban II preached the Crusade in 1095. Then vast new opportunities opened for him.

Life's Work

With protestations of goodwill toward his former enemy Alexius, Bohemond led a large contingent of Norman warriors and kinsmen to Constantinople late in 1096 to take part in the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land from Turkish Muslims. By the following spring, a number of small armies led by other European warlords had also arrived at Constantinople. Those forces constituted the First Crusade.

The Crusaders were united in their overall objective but in little else. The greed, pride, and jealousy of their leaders resulted in a lack of unified command and in dangerous rivalries among them, especially between Bohemond and Count Raymond IV of Toulouse. The Crusaders also disagreed about the extent of obligation and alliance to their host, Alexius. Bohemond became his vassal, a status that later caused trouble, as it gave Alexius a claim to what Bohemond acquired.

A joint Crusader-Byzantine army invaded Asia Minor in the spring of 1097 but cooperated only long enough to besiege and liberate the city of Nicaea. Thereafter, while Alexius stayed behind to secure western Asia Minor, the Crusaders struck out toward the Holy Land. Near Dorylaeum on July 1, Turkish cavalry attacked. In the battle that ensued, Bohemond commanded one of the Crusader contingents. The Turks were defeated so decisively that the Princes’ Crusade could pass through the remainder of Asia Minor without incident.

The Crusade emerged onto the plains of northern Syria in the autumn of 1097 and there began what proved the most difficult, and for Bohemond the most important, operation of the campaign the siege of ancient, rich, and well-fortified Antioch. Bohemond and Raymond both coveted the city as spoil. For Bohemond, the challenge was to work with Raymond to capture Antioch at the same time he worked against him to secure it as his own.

The siege of Antioch took eight months (from October, 1097, to June, 1098). Famine, disease, desertions, and occasional attacks by Turkish relief columns slowed progress. A breakthrough finally came when a disgruntled defender of one of Antioch's towers offered secretly to betray the city to Bohemond. Bohemond negotiated the price of this treachery and then approached his fellow captains with the proposal that whoever first breached the defenses would be named governor. Raymond would not agree, but once the other captains did, Bohemond led his troops to the tower commanded by the traitor and began the predictably successful final assault. Antioch fell on June 3. Raymond's forces seized the Bridge Gate Tower and the former governor's palace to prevent Bohemond's control of the city, but before Bohemond could combat them, a greater threat appeared outside the walls.

A Turkish army under Kerboga of Mosul appeared at Antioch a few days after the Crusaders captured the city and began a siege. The Crusaders then had to defend the city, which was low on provisions as a result of their own recent siege. The miraculous discovery of what was alleged to be the Holy Lance that pierced the side of Jesus boosted the morale of the Crusaders, but it was Bohemond who finally saved them. He persuaded them that the best defense was to attack, and then, on June 28, 1098, he led the attack that defeated and drove off Kerboga's army. Antioch was secure, yet its ownership was not determined until the following spring, when, in the absence of his colleagues who had gone to liberate Jerusalem, Bohemond forcefully ejected Raymond's garrisons from their positions in the city.

Bohemond's tenure as prince of Antioch lasted five years (from 1099 to 1104). Most of that time, he spent at war or in prison. He fought to defend his principality from Alexius, who demanded that Antioch be surrendered to him; he fought to defend it from Raymond, who still wanted it; and he fought to enlarge it at the expense of his Muslim neighbors. While fighting Muslims in the summer of 1100, Bohemond was captured. He spent the following three years in a Turkish prison, until ransomed for 100,000 gold pieces. Meanwhile, his nephew Tancred had served as regent in Antioch. Bohemond resumed control of the principality briefly on his release in 1103. The following year, however, he reinstalled Tancred as regent so that he could return to Europe, ostensibly to raise money for the debts incurred by his wars and his ransom but actually to raise an army with which to relieve pressure on Antioch by attacking Alexius's empire from the west.

Bohemond's reputation as a great warrior guaranteed for him a favorable reception by the pope and the great men of Italy and France, whom he visited during the years from 1105 to 1107. He regaled his hosts with tales of the Crusade and of Byzantine treachery and extorted from them financial and military backing for a crusade against Alexius. Philip of France also gave him the hand in marriage of his daughter Constance.

In October, 1107, approximately thirty-four thousand Italian and French Crusaders under Bohemond invaded the Byzantine Empire, using the same strategy that Bohemond and Guiscard had used in the 1080'. They took Avlona but were resisted while besieging Durazzo. The defenders thwarted all their efforts to breach, to mine, and to surmount Durazzo's walls, while Alexius's land and naval forces denied them access to the interior and easy communications with Italy. Those obstacles, plus disease, hunger, and desertion, sapped the strength of the invaders and forced Bohemond to negotiate withdrawal to Italy. By September, 1108, the Crusade was over. Bohemond returned to Apulia in disgrace.

The humiliation of the failed Crusade wore off in time. By the spring of 1111, Bohemond was again collecting an army, probably to take to Antioch. Before completing his preparations, he became ill and died. He was then approximately fifty-nine years of age.

Bohemond and Constance had had two sons during their five-year marriage; the first died in infancy, and the second, named Bohemond, succeeded his father in Apulia and eventually also in Antioch.

Significance

Bohemond I was a conspicuously successful example of the bellicose, acquisitive warlord of medieval Europe. From landless warrior in 1085, he rose to become, by 1106, the leader of Apulia and Antioch and the son-in-law of the king of France. Self-interest seems to have motivated him more than high principle; he participated in the Crusade for what he might win more than for the pious intent of the enterprise. Indeed, he visited Jerusalem only once, briefly, after it had been liberated.

What was his goal? Were his accomplishments part of a larger unrealized plan? Here scholars are left to speculate, for Bohemond kept his own counsel. It could be that his acquisition of Antioch was simply successful opportunism. It could also be that taking Antioch was part of a larger plan to link in profitable commerce the ports of Apulia with a major Levantine trading center. More ambitious still, it could be that Antioch was part of a plan to conquer the Byzantine Empire his father's unrequited ambition. There was contemporary precedent for such grandiose schemes in William, duke of Normandy's conquest of England. If Bohemond made such plans, it was lack of resources more than lack of skill that prevented their realization.

Indeed, in military skills, Bohemond was among the most adept of that age, the failed Crusade of 1107-1108 notwithstanding. At Dorylaeum and at Antioch, he displayed his competence in the major facets of contemporary war: pitched battle and siege craft. Had it not been for his skills, the First Crusade might have failed at Antioch, and the two hundred years of crusades that helped broaden European horizons during the Middle Ages might not have followed.

Bohemond's administrative skills might also have been considerable. Antioch proved to be one of the most durable of the Crusader states, but how much of Antioch's government was designed by Bohemond during his brief tenure as its prince remains uncertain. Contemporary accounts by both his friends and enemies concentrate mostly on his career as a warrior.

Bibliography

Asbridge, Thomas S. The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, 2000. An examination of the formation of the principality of Antioch which touches on Bohemond, its first prince.

Foss, Michael. People of the First Crusade. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. This work on the First Crusade focuses on the people involved. Bibliography and index.

France, John. Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. France studies the First Crusade in detail, primarily as a military campaign. Bohemond’s role in it is amply discussed.

Hill, Rosalind, ed. The Deeds of the Franks and the Other Pilgrims to Jerusalem. New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1962. The anonymous author of this work was one of Bohemond’s vassals. His account covers the Crusade to 1099 and was published almost immediately thereafter. Bohemond took this work with him to Europe in 1005 and disseminated it. Virtually every other twelfth century account of the First Crusade was borrowed from this one.

Nicholson, Robert L. Tancred: A Study of His Career and Work in Their Relation to the First Crusade and the Establishment of the Latin States in Syria and Palestine. 1940. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1978. Illuminates not only the military exploits of Tancred but also his complex and largely cooperative relationship with Bohemond.

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusaders, 1095-1131. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. The story of the First Crusade, including recruitment, preparation, preaching, the holy war, and the return. One appendix lists the Crusaders. Illustrations, maps, and index.

Yewdale, Ralph B. Bohemond I, Prince of Antioch. 1924. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1980. An uncompleted Princeton dissertation published after Yewdale’s death by a teacher who thought it a significant contribution to the field. Yewdale is sympathetic to Bohemond but not uncritical. Excellent bibliography of primary sources and lengthy, if now dated, list of secondary sources.