Bohemond’s disenchantment with the fragility of Antioch’s position is further evidenced by his calculated appropriation of the city’s remaining wealth and manpower before departing. Even the contemporary Latin writer Ralph of Caen, normally a promoter of Bohemond’s cause, observed that ‘he carried off the gold, silver, gems and clothing [leaving the city] to Tancred without protection, wages and mercenaries’. Bohemond set sail from the shores of Syria around September 1104. During the First Crusade, he had trained the full force of his military genius and avaricious guile upon Antioch’s conquest. Now, as he turned his back upon the Levant, he must have known that he was abandoning his old prize to a desperately bleak and uncertain future.⁶⁴

On the brink of collapse

So it was that Tancred began the year 1105 in a state of beleaguered penury, prince-regent of a realm bound for destruction. In the fire of this crisis, the defining challenge of his career, he proved his mettle. Blending charm and coercion, he won the support of Antioch’s indigenous population for an emergency tax, restocking the treasury and financing the fresh recruitment of mercenaries. He also sought to replenish further his resources by exploiting fully the one positive consequence of the debacle at Harran, Antioch’s nominal lordship over the county of Edessa. Calling ‘all the Christian men’ of northern Syria to arms, stripping Edessa, Marash and Tell Bashir of all but token garrisons, he had by early spring assembled an army of some 1,000 knights and 9,000 foot soldiers. Tancred’s unshakable resolution and incisive strategic acuity now came to the fore.

Facing such a plethora of enemies, he recognised that he could neither fight on every front nor fall back upon a policy of inert defence. Instead he employed targeted, proactive aggression, selecting his quarry with great care. In mid-April he marched on Artah, engineering a decisive confrontation with Ridwan of Aleppo. This was an audacious gamble. Overcoming this foe in pitched battle might allow Tancred to regain the initiative and rekindle the Franks’ martial authority, but he must have known that the Aleppans would outnumber his own forces, perhaps three to one, and that any defeat would mark the end of Latin dominion over Syria.

Before leaving Antioch the Christians undertook rites of spiritual purification, including a three-day fast, purging their souls of sin in a preparation for death that echoed crusading practice. Tancred then crossed the Orontes at the Iron Bridge and moved in to besiege Artah. Once Ridwan took the bait, advancing with a reported 30,000 troops, Tancred backed off. The centrepiece of his strategy was to capitalise upon his close knowledge of the local terrain and to exploit his growing appreciation of Muslim tactics. The route between Artah and the Iron Bridge passed through an area of flat but rocky ground, over which horses could not easily gallop, before reaching an open plain. It was to this second zone that Tancred retreated and, on 20 April 1105, Ridwan pursued. One Latin contemporary described the battle that followed:

The Christians held their positions as if torpid…then, when the Turks had passed the rough ground, Tancred charged into their midst as if having been roused from sleep. The Turks quickly retreated, hoping, as was their custom, to turn about while fleeing and shoot. However, their hopes and their tricks were foiled…the [Franks’] spears struck them in the back and the path arrested their flight. Their horses were useless.

In the ensuing battle, the Latins ploughed into the packed ranks of terrified Muslim troops, dispatching the enemy almost at will as Aleppan resistance crumbled. Horrified, Ridwan scurried away to safety as best he could, losing his banner in the process, and Tancred was left the victor on the field, enriched with spoils and glory.

The Battle of Artah marked a watershed in the history of the northern crusader states. Over the next few years Tancred readily recouped the losses suffered after Harran. Artah was immediately reoccupied and the Summaq plateau soon followed suit. Ridwan sued for peace, trying to position himself as a subservient ally, and, with the frontier zone between Antioch and Aleppo secured, Tancred was able to direct his attention elsewhere. By 1110 he had effected long-term Antiochene dominion over Cilicia and Latakia at the expense of the Greeks. At the same time, he shored up the principality’s southern defences against another potentially aggressive Muslim neighbour, the town of Shaizar, by seizing the neighbouring ancient Roman settlement of Apamea. In personal terms, the success of 1105 also served to legitimise Tancred’s position; before long he was ruling less as Bohemond’s regent and more as a prince in his own right. In this, however, he was also aided by a concurrent decline in the fortunes of his famed uncle.⁶⁵

Bohemond’s crusade

Bohemond of Taranto sailed for Europe in autumn 1104. It was later rumoured among the Greeks that he employed a bizarre form of trickery to avoid capture by Byzantine agents during his voyage across the Mediterranean. Feigning his own death, Bohemond was said to have travelled west in a coffin punctured with concealed air holes. To complete the ruse, he was entombed alongside the rotting carcass of a strangled cockerel to ensure that his own ‘corpse’ emitted a suitably revolting putrefactive odour. Indeed, Emperor Alexius’ daughter, Anna Comnena, even allowed herself a note of admiration for Bohemond’s indomitable ‘barbarian’ spirit when she wrote, ‘I wonder how on earth he endured such a siege on his nose and still continued to live.’

Whatever his mode of transport, Bohemond’s arrival in Italy in early 1105 was greeted with a clamorous outpouring of adulation. The self-styled hero of the First Crusade had returned. He soon won the support of Pope Urban’s successor, Paschal II, for a new crusading expedition, one which Bohemond proceeded to promote in Italy and France for the next two years. Along the way he fulfilled his vow to visit the shrine of St Leonard at Noblat, depositing a gift of silver shackles as a sign of gratitude for his release from imprisonment in 1103. He also appears to have sponsored the copying and dispersal of a rousing narrative account of the First Crusade, akin to the Gesta Francorum, which promoted his own achievements and helped to blacken the name of the Greeks. With his fame in the ascendant and his recruiting rallies attracting large enthusiastic crowds, Bohemond secured a marriage alliance which propelled him into the highest echelons of the Frankish aristocracy. In the spring of 1106 he was wed to Princess Constance, daughter of the king of France; around the same time one of the king’s illegitimate daughters, Cecilia, was betrothed to Tancred. Bohemond used the occasion of his own nuptials at Chartres to promote his new crusade, launching a stinging attack on his proclaimed enemy, Alexius Comnenus–supposed betrayer of the crusaders in 1098 and 1101, and invader of Antioch.

By the end of 1106 Bohemond had returned to southern Italy to supervise the ongoing construction of a crusading fleet, having recruited many thousands of men to his cause. But despite the size of the force that gathered in Apulia one year later–some 30,000 men to be carried by a fleet of more than 200 ships–historians have long disputed the nature of this expedition. The current consensus maintains that this campaign, which targeted the Greek Christian empire of Byzantium, cannot be regarded as a fully fledged crusade, or at the very least should be branded as a distortion of the crusading ideal. The expedition obviously bore some striking similarities to the First Crusade, with participants taking a vow, bearing the symbol of a cross and expecting to receive a remission of sins. The nub of the debate, however, depends on papal involvement. Surely, so it is argued, the pope would never knowingly have awarded the privileged status of a crusade to an expedition against fellow Christians; rather, it was Bohemond, twisted by ambition and hatred, who deceived Paschal II, pretending that his armies would fight in the Levant.