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A Failed Invasion Ends in Vassalage at the Treaty of Devol

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A Failed Invasion Ends in Vassalage at the Treaty of Devol

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Having taken Antioch for himself against his own oath to restore it to Byzantine rule, Bohemond of Taranto later returned to Europe and raised a fresh army for a direct invasion of Byzantine territory, launched in 1107. Where the capture of Antioch had rewarded his crusade generalship, this second campaign turned that same ambition against the empire whose territory he had earlier promised to hand back, an open break with the power he had once nominally served.

The invasion failed. By 1108 Bohemond's forces were defeated, and the resulting settlement, the Treaty of Devol, bound him for the rest of his life to hold Antioch not as an independent prince but as a vassal of the Byzantine emperor, the very relationship of subordination his original oath had promised and his conquest of the city had then evaded for a decade. The treaty formally recorded terms Bohemond had spent ten years and a failed invasion trying to avoid.

Bohemond held the Principality of Antioch as that Byzantine vassal from 1108 until his death in 1111, closing out a career that had carried him from a broken oath at Antioch's capture, through a decade as an effectively independent prince, to formal subordination under the treaty his own failed invasion produced, a full turn from the ambition that had founded the principality in the first place.

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Sources
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
Christopher Tyerman, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006
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