Antioch
Foundation of the Principality
The Principality of Antioch was created with the fall of that city, in 1098, during the First Crusade. Bohemond of Taranto, who became Bohemond I of Antioch, was one of the leaders of the original Crusader expedition to the Holy Land. Greedy and acquisitive, he set his sights on this land in order to carve out a feudal domain for himself. By manipulating the fears of his fellow Crusaders in the face of an impending attack by Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul, Bohemond was able to secure their assent to his dominion of the city and surrounding territory. These less-than-flattering characteristics were to inform almost the entirety of Bohemond's rule, whether directly or, indirectly, through his nephew and protégé, Tancred.
Within two years of the founding of the principality, Bohemond I was captured by the Danishmend emir. Antioch was saved by the swift intervention of Baldwin I of Edessa, and Tancred exchanged his own lordship of Tiberias for the Antiochene regency. During Bohemond’s captivity a few of the ill-fated army of the Crusade of 1101 managed to reach Antioch, but were neither interested nor able to rescue him. He remained a prisoner for three years, during which time Tancred conquered Byzantine Cilicia (1101) and, finishing the project that Bohemond himself had initiated the year after the founding of the principality, Byzantine Lattakieh (1103). Fearing the growing power of his Norman neighbor, Baldwin of Bourcq, now Count Baldwin II of Edessa, ransomed Bohemond from the Danishmends. Upon his release Bohemond, in alliance with Edessa, attacked Aleppo, a powerful Muslim city just east of the outermost limits of Antioch. This battle proved a near disaster for the Syrian princes when both Baldwin of Bourcq and Joscelin of Courtenay, Bourcq's most powerful vassal, were captured. Two further consequences of the defeat were that Tancred, who had not returned to Tiberias in the meantime, was named regent of Edessa, and the Byzantines were emboldened to recapture Cilicia and the harbor and lower town of Lattakieh. Enraged at what must have appeared to Bohemond to have been Greek duplicity (despite his vow a few years earlier to Alexius I to return to the empire any formerly Byzantine territory that he might capture), he named Tancred regent of Antioch and sailed for Europe with the intent of gaining support for an attack against the Greeks. In 1107 Bohemond arrived back in Outremer and unsuccessfully laid siege to the Byzantine city of Dyrrhachium, whereupon he returned to Italy to die in relative obscurity.