Egypt continued to threaten Frankish Palestine, but al-Afdal launched no further large-scale offensives and certainly never achieved significant success. For the moment Damascus had been partially neutralised. Tughtegin adopted a more nuanced, predominantly non-aggressive approach to his dealings with Jerusalem. He was certainly not averse to defending Damascene interests with force when he considered them to be under threat, and he also prosecuted frequent punitive raids into Christian territory. But at the same time he agreed a succession of limited-term pacts with Baldwin, primarily directed at easing the path of mutually beneficial trade between Syria and Palestine.

The most enduring consequence of these dealings was the formulation of a partial armistice (confirmed by written treaty) around 1109. This remarkable accord related to the region east of the Sea of Galilee–known by the Franks as the Terre de Sueth (or Black Lands) because of its dark basalt soil–centred on the fertile arable lands of the Hauran, and extending north into the Golan Heights and south of the Yarmuk River. Baldwin and Tughtegin agreed to establish what in essence was a partially demilitarised zone in this area, allowing Muslim and Christian farmers to cooperate in the exploitation of the land. The produce of the Terre de Sueth was then split into three parts, with one portion retained by the resident peasants and the remainder divided between Jerusalem and Damascus. This arrangement remained in place for much of the twelfth century.⁶¹

In the first five years of his reign, however, King Baldwin’s own survival, and arguably that of his entire realm, had been in doubt. Only through flashes of gifted leadership and the good fortune of Muslim disunity and Fatimid martial ineptitude had the Latins prevailed.

LATIN SYRIA IN CRISIS (1101–8)

In the first chill months of 1105, Tancred, the celebrated veteran of the First Crusade, had every reason to despair. He found himself in command of the Latin principality of Antioch at a time when that newborn realm seemed in its death throes. Six months earlier, the Franks’ reputation for invincibility had been shattered when Antioch’s army suffered a frightening and humiliating defeat at the hands of Islam. In response, Tancred’s famed uncle, and Antioch’s supposed prince, Bohemond, had fled the Levant, stripping the city of its resources even as he rushed to set sail for the West. With the principality crumbling before him, beset by rebellion and invasion on every front, Tancred faced the spectre of ruination. Seven years earlier, he had witnessed first hand the horror of Antioch’s siege and the terrible cost of its seizure by the crusade. Now, it seemed, the faltering Frankish enclave created by that conquest was doomed to collapse.

Little, if any, of the blame for this crisis could be laid at Tancred’s feet. In the spring of 1101 he had travelled north from Palestine to act as Antioch’s regent after Bohemond’s imprisonment. In the two years that followed Tancred quickly restored a sense of stability and security to the principality, demonstrating both vigour and competence. Shortly before his capture, Bohemond had allowed the fertile plains of Cilicia, north-west of Antioch, to slip out of his grasp. Hoping for greater autonomy, the region’s Armenian Christian population had switched allegiance to the Byzantine Empire, but Tancred beat them back into submission with a brief but vicious campaign. Not content simply to recoup his uncle’s losses, Tancred then sought to expand the principality. Like the kingdom of Jerusalem, Antioch needed to control the ports of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, but Latakia, home to Syria’s best natural harbour, remained in Greek hands despite Bohemond’s intermittent efforts. After a protracted siege, however, the town fell to Tancred in 1103.

Tancred seems to have relished the new-found opportunities and authority his position offered; certainly he made no effort to orchestrate the speedy release of his uncle. This task was instead taken up by Bohemond’s recent ecclesiastical appointee, Patriarch Bernard, and by Baldwin of Bourcq, now count of Edessa. Together they set about amassing the vast ransom demanded by Bohemond’s captor, the Danishmendid emir–100,000 gold pieces. The Armenian Kogh Vasil, lord of two cities in the Upper Euphrates, gave one-tenth of this sum in return for promises of alliance, but in the words of one rather scandalised eastern Christian contemporary, ‘Tancred gave nothing.’ Eventually, in May 1103, Bohemond was freed. The consequences for Tancred were galling; not only did he have to hand over the reins of power in Antioch, he was also compelled to relinquish his own conquests in Cilicia and Latakia.⁶²

The Battle of Harran (1104)

With his own liberty and authority restored, Bohemond sought to build upon his friendship with Count Baldwin II of Edessa. Over the next twelve months the two united in a series of campaigns designed to subdue the territory between Antioch and Edessa and to isolate and harass Aleppo. It was probably with the latter goal in mind that they launched an expedition east of the Euphrates in spring 1104. Dominion over this region would have secured the county of Edessa’s southern frontier while hampering Aleppan communication with Mesopotamia. As it was, they encountered fierce opposition from a sizeable Muslim army, led by the Seljuq Turkish rulers of Mosul and Mardin.

Battle was joined on the plains south of Harran around 7 May. Bohemond and Tancred held the right flank, while Baldwin II commanded Edessa’s forces on the left, alongside his cousin Joscelin of Courtenay (a well-connected northern French aristocrat who arrived in the Levant after 1101 and had received a lordship centred on the major fortress town of Tell Bashir). In the fighting that followed, the Edessene troops became detached from the rest of the army–overcommitting to a charge, they fell foul of a ferocious counter-attack and were routed. Baldwin and Joscelin were taken captive as thousands of their compatriots were killed or imprisoned. Bohemond and Tancred led a chastened retreat towards Edessa, where the latter was left in charge of defending the city.

Harran was a shocking reversal for the Franks. Battlefield losses through casualties and captivity were significant, but the greatest damage was psychological. This defeat shifted the balance of power and confidence in the northern reaches of the Levant; it now dawned on the indigenous peoples of Syria that the Latins were not, after all, indomitable. A near-contemporary Muslim writing in Damascus reflected that ‘[Harran] was a great and unparalleled victory…it discouraged the Franks, diminished their numbers and broke their power of offence, while the hearts of the Muslims were strengthened.’ In fact, Muslims, Greeks and Armenians all seized the opportunity to turn the tide in their favour, and it was Antioch, not Edessa, that suffered most. The Byzantines reoccupied Cilicia and Latakia, although the latter’s citadel may have remained in Frankish hands. To the south-east the towns of the Summaq region expelled their Latin garrisons, turning to Aleppo for leadership. In a final indignity, the strategically critical town of Artah followed suit soon after. Guardian of the main Roman road inland, lying barely one day’s march north-east of Antioch, Artah was regarded by contemporaries as the city’s ‘shield’. By the late summer of 1104, the principality had been decimated; all that remained of this once burgeoning realm was a small nucleus of territory around Antioch itself.⁶³

Early that autumn, Bohemond made an unexpected decision. Recalling Tancred from Edessa, he convened a council in the basilica of St Peter and announced his intention to leave the Levant. The real motives behind this move are hard to unravel. Publicly Bohemond avowed that, in order to save Latin Syria, he would recruit a new Frankish army in western Europe. He may also have expressed his determination to fulfil his vows to St Leonard (to whom he had appealed while in prison) by making a pilgrimage to the shrine of his relics at Noblat, in France. Privately, however, he seems to have had little intention of making a swift return to Outremer, planning, instead, to raise a force with which to attack the Byzantine Empire head-on in the Balkans. This might have the effect of distracting Alexius Comnenus, perhaps forestalling a direct Greek assault on Antioch, but Bohemond’s strategy probably owed more to his desire to conquer new territory in the Adriatic and the Aegean, and to his dream of sitting upon the throne of mighty Constantinople itself.