Principality of Antioch

The broken oath

Drafted from Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130 (2000)formation

Before the First Crusade was allowed through Byzantine territory, its leaders swore an oath at Constantinople: any former imperial city they recovered would be handed back to Alexios Komnenos. Antioch was a former imperial city. It had been Byzantine until 1084, fourteen years earlier, and there were men in the crusading camp who had been alive when it was.

The siege lasted from October 1097 to June 1098 and was appalling — famine inside the besiegers' lines, desertions, and then the city taken by treachery through an Armenian tower-captain days before a relief army arrived, so that the crusaders spent the next month besieged in the place they had just captured. Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy and the son of the man who had spent his career fighting the Byzantines in the Adriatic, organised the entry and the defence.

He then kept the city, and the oath was the first casualty. His argument was that Alexios had failed to bring the army the promised support and had forfeited the claim; the emperor's was that a sworn undertaking is a sworn undertaking. Both positions were arguable and neither was going to move, and the result was that the second Crusader state came into existence in a state of unresolved dispute with the greatest Christian power in the region, which is a bad way to found anything.

The chronology is worth marking as it was on the Edessa page. Antioch fell in June 1098 and was a functioning principality with a frontier and a chancery inside two years. Jerusalem was not taken until July 1099. Two of the four Frankish states existed before the crusade reached its objective, and the two that mattered most militarily for the next century were both in the north.

What the quarrel produced was two irreconcilable descriptions of the same principality, both of them held in good faith and both enforceable. The princes of Antioch held the city because they had taken it, and said so. The emperors held that Antioch was theirs and its prince their man, and twice sent armies to make the point. Neither position ever gave way; the argument was still live sixty years later.

The nail

Drafted from Komnene, The Alexiad (1928)formation

Antioch was taken in June 1098 after an eight-month siege in which the besiegers came closer to starving than the besieged. How that happened is told most often from inside the Frankish camp. Anna Komnene tells it from Constantinople, at second hand, and the distortions in her version are as useful as the facts.

Hunger, and a bishop

Her account begins where the crusade's own accounts do: the Latins terribly pressed by famine and blockade, going to their bishop for counsel.

The bishop she names is Peter — the man, she notes with satisfaction, who had been beaten at Helenopolis. He tells them the trouble is their own: they had promised to keep themselves pure until they reached Jerusalem, they have broken that promise, and God is therefore no longer helping them as before. They must repent in sackcloth and ashes, with tears and vigils, and he will spend his own time propitiating the Deity on their behalf.

They obey. A few days later the bishop, inspired by a divine voice, assembles the chief counts and tells them to dig on the right side of the altar, where they will find the Holy Nail.

They dig, find nothing, and come back discouraged. He prays harder and sends them to search more carefully. They go again, find it, and carry it to him overcome with joy and awe. It is entrusted to Raymond of Toulouse to carry into battle, as the holiest of them.

Two mistakes worth keeping

Anna has the object wrong — it was the Lance, not the Nail, and her translator says so in a footnote. She also has the man wrong: the visions belonged to Peter Bartholomew, a poor Provençal, and she has attached them to Peter the Hermit, the only Peter of the crusade whose name had reached her.

Both errors tell you what the Byzantine court knew and how it knew it. The story had crossed to Constantinople as a story — a relic found under an altar after a fast, and a famous preacher — and arrived with the roles compressed the way rumour compresses them.

What is striking is what she does not do with it. Anna Komnene despises Bohemond, thinks the crusade broke its oath, and writes the whole episode in her own book without irony. The relic was found. The prayer worked.

The battle, and the man who asked first

Then the sortie from the secret door. Robert of Flanders asks to ride out ahead with three companions only; he dismounts, prostrates himself three times, prays, and they charge Kerbogha where he stands on his hillock, shouting God with us.

The Turks break before the battle has properly begun. Most of the fugitives are caught in the eddies of the river and drowned, and Anna says those coming behind crossed on the bodies. The baggage and booty were so great it took thirty days to carry into Antioch.

And then, in a single sentence, the founding of the principality:

They took thought for Antioch and looked for a man to guard it. This man was Bohemund who had asked for this position even before the city was captured.

The rest of the army went on to Jerusalem, took several coastal fortresses on the way, passed by the ones that would have needed a long siege, and stormed the city within a lunar month.

Anna gives no comment at that point, and none is needed. She has just recorded, as a matter of administrative convenience, that the man who wanted Antioch before it fell was given it by the colleagues he had sworn an oath with — and her whole book is an argument about what that oath was worth.

A Greek city with a Norman prince

Drafted from Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130 (2000)expansion

Antioch was not Edessa. Where the county was a thin Frankish crust over an Armenian and Syriac countryside, the principality's capital was one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean — a patriarchal see, a Greek city with Greek institutions, walls running for miles over a mountain, and a working port at St Symeon at the mouth of the Orontes.

So Antioch lived on customs as well as on land, which Edessa inland never could. It is also why the principality's central internal quarrel was ecclesiastical. Antioch had a Greek patriarch. The Latins installed their own and spent a century in a dispute that was never merely about liturgy, because the return of the Greek patriarch was one of the standing imperial demands and conceding it meant conceding the larger claim. Greek and Armenian went on being languages of administration alongside Latin, and not as a concession to tolerated minorities: these were the people who ran the city.

The principality's own expansion ran east towards Aleppo and north into Cilicia. It ended in a single morning in June 1119, which the next chapter is about.

Not one man escaped to tell the tale

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)peak

In June 1119 Roger of Salerno, ruling Antioch for the boy prince, marched out to meet the Artuqid lord of Aleppo without waiting for the king of Jerusalem, who was coming.

Ibn al-Qalanisi, in Damascus, describes the army he took. Franks and Armenian footsoldiers gathered from every province and district of the principality; more than twenty thousand horse and foot besides camp followers; an immense army, he says, completely equipped and perfectly armed. It encamped at Sarmada, between Antioch and Aleppo. This is Antioch at its largest — every man the principality could put in a field, in one place.

The Turkmens had been assembling from every quarter, in his phrase, like lions seeking their prey and gerfalcons hovering over their victims.

The morning

The two armies came in sight of each other and the Muslims charged at once, surrounding the Franks and closing on them with swords and arrows.

Not one hour of Saturday 28 June 1119 had passed, Qalanisi writes, before the Franks were on the ground in one prostrate mass, horse and foot together with their animals and their weapons, and not one man of them escaped to tell the tale. Roger was found stretched out among the dead.

Men who had been there afterwards walked the field to look at what had happened, and what they remembered was the horses: lying on the ground like hedgehogs, because of the quantity of arrows standing in them.

What was destroyed

The Franks called it the Field of Blood, and the name has stuck to it in every language since.

What was killed there was not a garrison or an expedition but the knighthood of the principality as a body — the class that held the castles, ran the frontier and supplied the field army. Antioch itself did not fall; Ilghazi did not seriously try, and the king of Jerusalem arrived and stabilised the frontier within weeks.

But the principality never expanded again on its own account. From 1119 its eastern boundary stopped moving, and for long stretches it was governed by regents sent from Jerusalem, because there was nobody in Antioch to govern it.

Half a century of northern Syrian history follows from one morning, and the morning happened because a prince would not wait a week for his ally.

The emperor comes in person

Drafted from Ridings, Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096-1204 (1993)contraction

The imperial claim on Antioch was not a grievance that faded. It was pursued for sixty years, in writing and then with armies, by three emperors in succession, and it produced the one case in the crusading period of a Latin state being made, formally and repeatedly, somebody's vassal.

The document was the treaty of Devol in 1108. Bohemond had gone back to Europe, raised a war against the empire, invaded the Balkans and been comprehensively beaten, and the terms Alexios imposed had him hold Antioch as a liegeman of the emperor for life, return the Greek patriarch, and pass the city to the empire afterwards. Bohemond signed and never returned to Syria; his nephew Tancred, in possession at Antioch, treated the treaty as a document about somebody else. In practical terms it governed nothing.

In legal terms it governed everything that followed, because the emperors now had it in writing. John II Komnenos came in 1137 with an army, obliged Raymond of Poitiers to do homage and to promise the city outright, and campaigned in Syria with the imperial standard flying over Antioch's citadel. Manuel I came in 1158 after Reynald of Châtillon had raided Byzantine Cyprus, and Reynald was made to walk bareheaded and barefoot with a rope round his neck through the imperial camp at Mamistra and lie prostrate before the emperor in front of an audience that included Latin envoys. In 1159 Manuel entered Antioch in a formal adventus, riding, with the prince of Antioch walking at his stirrup.

The relation was constituted at Devol in 1108, repudiated immediately, and then collected twice by emperors who brought enough soldiers to collect it.

That is worth setting against the way the twelfth-century empire is usually described. Byzantium in this period is mostly written about as something things happen to — outmanoeuvred, partitioned, eventually conquered. Here it is an overlord successfully imposing terms on a Latin state and enforcing them in person, twice, in the century when nobody thinks of it as strong.

Rendered more discreet by thy spear

Drafted from Komnene, The Alexiad (1928)aside?What aside means

The man who founded the principality of Antioch is described at length by the daughter of the emperor he cheated, and Anna Komnene's portrait is worth having precisely because she is not pretending to be fair.

Supper at Cosmidium

Bohemond arrived at Constantinople in 1097 with the crusade, and was lodged and given a rich table. The cooks also brought in uncooked meat and birds and explained that the food had been prepared in the usual way, but that if it did not suit him, here was raw meat to be cooked however he liked.

That was on Alexios' instructions. He had guessed that Bohemond would suspect poison, and he was right. Bohemond would not touch the cooked dishes or even put a fingertip to them; he pushed them away and distributed them among his attendants — appearing to do them a kindness, Anna says, and in fact handing them a cup of death. His own cooks prepared the raw meat in the Frankish manner.

The next morning he asked the men who had eaten the supper how they felt. They said they felt exceedingly well. So he explained himself: remembering his wars with the emperor and that terrible battle, he had been afraid of poison.

The emperor then had a room in the palace heaped with treasure — cloth, stamped gold and silver — until there was no walking across it, and the doors thrown open suddenly. Bohemond exclaimed that if all this were his, he would have made himself master of many countries long ago; and was told it was a present. He thanked them and went to his lodging. When the treasure was delivered he had changed his mind and said he had never imagined the emperor would insult him so, and sent it back. Alexios, Anna writes, quoted the proverb about bad things returning to their owner — and when Bohemond saw the porters carefully packing it all up again, he changed his mind once more and gave them pleasant looks, like a polypus that changes its form in an instant.

Her verdict: in roguery and courage he was superior to every Latin who came through, as he was inferior to them in troops and money.

The document

Eleven years later Bohemond had taken Antioch, kept it against his oath, gone home to Europe, raised a war against the empire, invaded the Balkans and been comprehensively beaten. The terms he accepted at Devol in 1108 are transcribed in the Alexiad in full, and they are extraordinary reading, because the voice is his.

The previous agreement, he begins, is annulled: he declared war and broke it, and that cancels the charges as well as the promises. Then, on the new one:

now as if moved by remorse and like a stricken fisherman I have recovered my sanity and, I might almost say, been rendered more discreet by thy spear.

He will be the emperor's liegeman — "or to express it more clearly and plainly, thy menial and subject". He will hold his lands as a gift under a golden bull signed in red ink. He will take arms against anyone who lifts a hand against the empire, Christian or pagan. He will receive two hundred pounds a year of the coinage of the emperor Michael, collected by an envoy sent from Syria. And he swears it on the Gospels, the Cross, the crown of thorns, the nails and the lance.

What a treaty is worth

Bohemond never went back to Syria. His nephew Tancred, who was actually in Antioch, treated the document as being about somebody else, and in the ordinary sense it governed nothing at all.

In another sense it governed the next sixty years, because it existed. Two emperors after Alexios came to Syria in person with armies to collect what was written in it, and both collected. A text that was a dead letter the day it was signed turned out to be the most durable thing Bohemond ever produced — more durable than the war he lost, and more durable than anything he actually held.

Four days in May

Drafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)end

Baybars came up from Egypt in the spring of 1268, took Jaffa in March and Beaufort in April, and arrived before Antioch in the middle of May. Bohemond VI was not there; he was at Tripoli. The constable Simon Mansel rode out, was captured, and was sent to tell the city to surrender. It refused.

The city was stormed on 18 May after four days. The gates were shut on the Mamluk order so that nobody could escape, and what followed inside was a massacre and an enslavement on a scale that appalled contemporaries who were professionally accustomed to both. Baybars afterwards wrote to Bohemond VI a letter describing in detail what had been done to his city and his people, which survives, and which is one of the more studied documents of the period precisely because of how deliberately it was composed to wound.

Antioch had been a great city without interruption for a millennium and a half — Seleucid capital, Roman metropolis, one of the five patriarchates, Byzantine frontier fortress, Norman principality. It stopped being one in that week and has never been one since. The site is a provincial town in southern Turkey.

The principality ended with it. There was no field army left, and no territory to speak of: Latakia held out until 1287 as an appendage of Tripoli, and the princes of Antioch after 1268 were princes of nothing, ruling at Tripoli and keeping the title. Nothing was conquered by Tripoli and nothing was inherited. The same man simply went on ruling the one thing he had left.

Antioch in 1268, Tripoli in 1289, Acre in 1291. Read in order, those are not three separate wars but one programme, worked through over twenty-three years by a state that had decided the Franks in Syria were a solved problem and was going down the list.

The letter to the count

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

Antioch was stormed in May 1268 and burnt to the ground. Baybars then wrote to its prince, who had not been in the city, to tell him what had happened to it.

He addressed him as count. Bohemond VI was still count of Tripoli; he was no longer prince of anything, and the salutation is the first blow of the letter.

What the letter says

It opens by reminding him that he has been looking on "like a man in a mortal swoon" while piece after piece of his territory was taken away. Then it describes the sack, sparing him nothing:

Hadst thou but seen thy knights trodden under the hoofs of the horses! thy palaces invaded by plunderers and ransacked for booty! thy treasures weighed out by the hundredweight! thy ladies bought and sold with thine own gear, at four for a dinar! hadst thou but seen thy churches demolished, thy crosses sawn in sunder, thy garbled gospels hawked about before the sun; the tombs of thy nobles cast to the ground; the monk, the priest, the deacon slaughtered on the altar; the rich abased to misery; princes of royal blood reduced to slavery! could'st thou but have seen the flames devouring thy halls... then would'st thou have said, "Would God that I were dust!"

And then the turn, which is the reason the letter is famous:

This letter holds happy tidings for thee: it tells thee that God watches over thee to prolong thy days, inasmuch as in these latter days thou wert not in Antioch!

It closes on the detail that makes the whole thing work. As not a man has escaped to tell him the tale, the sultan tells it; as no soul could bring him word that he alone is safe while all the rest have perished, the sultan brings it.

The same sentence, a hundred and forty-nine years apart

A Damascene chronicler used almost exactly that phrase about Antioch once before: after the Field of Blood in 1119, not one man of them escaped to tell the tale.

In 1119 it described the destruction of the principality's army and Antioch survived. In 1268 it described the destruction of Antioch, and this time the formula was not a chronicler's flourish but a piece of psychological warfare posted to the man it concerned, with a covering note explaining that he was lucky to have been elsewhere.

Afterwards

There was no principality left to lose. Latakia held out until 1287 as an appendage of Tripoli; the princes of Antioch after 1268 were princes of nothing, living at Tripoli and keeping the title.

The city did not recover. Its marble went where the marble of other razed Syrian towns went in those years, into the decoration of mosques in Cairo. The patriarchate of Antioch, one of the ancient sees of the Christian world, has been a title held elsewhere ever since; nobody has governed Syria from Antioch since the afternoon Baybars' men came over the wall.