Bohemond of Taranto

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

Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman nobleman of southern Italy and son of Robert Guiscard, joined the First Crusade with a force of Normans drawn from Sicily and Apulia, bringing to the expedition the same military energy his family had already used to carve out territory in southern Italy at Byzantine and Lombard expense. Born in San Marco Argentano, in Calabria, he arrived in the East as one of the crusade's most capable and ambitious commanders, a reputation the campaign at Antioch would soon confirm.

He played a leading role in the prolonged siege and eventual capture of Antioch in 1098, one of the hardest fought engagements of the entire crusade, a siege that dragged on for months before the city finally fell. Before the siege, Bohemond and the other crusade leaders had sworn an oath to restore any conquered Byzantine territory to the Byzantine Empire, the power under whose nominal authority the expedition had originally set out from Constantinople.

Bohemond broke that oath once Antioch fell, taking the city for himself as Prince of Antioch rather than returning it to Byzantine control. The result was the first of the Crusader states to be founded, an outcome that rewarded his role in the siege while directly contradicting the commitment he had made before it, a contradiction that would shape the rest of his career and eventually draw him back into open conflict with Byzantium itself.

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.