God's War: A New History of the Crusades

reconstructed. Each can be shown to have as much avarice or as little piety as the other. The dichotomy between spiritual and mercenary possesses little meaning. Raymond of Toulouse, whose religious sincerity has been widely accepted, proved both scheming and petulant in his earnest quest for an eastern principality, which he finally achieved in the lands around Tripoli in the south Lebanon. The spiritual agonizing of Tancred of Lecce, Bohemund’s nephew, was matched by his alert political opportunism. Godfrey of Bouillon accepted power and lands when offered them in 1099. Baldwin of Boulogne, the most obviously careerist of all, devoted the last twenty years of his life to defending the Holy Places. All the leaders sought to protect their material interests rather than proceed to Jerusalem in the five months after July 1098. Bohemund was not alone in his desire to achieve status, lands and wealth; neither did this ambition automatically contradict the genuineness of his adherence to the cause of Jerusalem. With Baldwin, he undertook a tricky and dangerous journey to fulfil his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre at Christmas 1099, a gesture that, for lack of evidence, cannot be assumed to have been purely for reasons of image or politics.

The picture of Bohemund the ruthless schemer derives from the Alexiad of Anna Comnena, Alexius’s daughter.³⁴ Writing half a century after the First Crusade, Anna insists on the deviousness of the westerners, their consistent desire to subvert and occupy the Byzantine empire, and the heroic patience and skill of Alexius, in an attempt to exonerate the emperor from any responsibility for admitting the Franks into the empire and his subsequent failure to establish Greek overlordship over Antioch. Bohemund, who invaded the Balkans twice, in the 1080s and again in 1107–8, is one of the villains of her staunchly anti-western account that has as much to do with the tangled dynastic and imperial politics of the twelfth century as with the events of the 1090s. Seductively vivid, Anna is a confused and misleading source for the crusade let alone the motives of the western leaders. Even her famous description of Bohemund himself – tall, slim, muscular, good complexion, short light-brown hair, forbidding expression – cannot be trusted, still less Runciman’s fancy that the teenage Anna was taken by his good looks, ‘being, like all Greeks down the ages, susceptible to human beauty’.³⁵

Nonetheless, Bohemund’s position on crusade is intriguing. The dominant personality in the expedition’s military leadership from April 1097 until January 1099, he founded a Norman dynasty in Antioch that outlasted the Norman kings of England and of Sicily. Yet in 1096, in contrast to all the other leaders who were at least of comital status (i.e. of a count), Bohemund was technically still a vassal of a count, his half-brother, the ineffectual Roger Borsa (1089–1111), younger son and heir of Robert Guiscard in southern Italy. The fabulous inheritance promised him by his father, Robert Guiscard, in the Balkans had come to nothing after the failure of the Norman invasion of 1081–5. Despite rebelling in 1085 and 1087 against Roger Borsa, Bohemund had failed to establish an independent territorial title for himself in the west, a political frustration that shaped his actions on crusade. Although possessed of political clout and contacts above his formal station – he knew Urban II personally – he lacked the extensive patrimony or dependent baronage that supported his fellow leaders. The army he gathered about him in southern Italy in the autumn of 1096 reflected this. The core seems to have been his close relatives, including his nephew, Tancred of Lecce and cousin, Richard of Salerno, known as Richard of the Principate, as well as his standard bearer, Robert FitzGerald. In addition there were former rebels, such as Robert of Ansa; and vassals of his half-brother, such as Robert FitzTristan, and of his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, such as Robert of Sourdeval.³⁶ His whole force was small, perhaps in total between 3,500 and 4,000 men. Lacking the power of lordship or the purse, Bohemund had to rely on more overt political and military skills. Even these failed to impose cohesion on his force. One nephew, William FitzMarquis, joined Hugh of Vermandois; another, Tancred, fought under his own banner, refused to accept Bohemund’s authority at Constantinople and thereafter pursued an increasingly independent line.

Bohemund’s army crossed the Adriatic from Bari to the coast of Epirus in late October 1096, probably deliberately avoiding the Byzantine garrison at Durazzo. It then dawdled its way to Constantinople, taking the best part of six months, at an average of just over three miles a day, almost being caught up by the larger force under Raymond of Toulouse, who had landed at Durazzo over three months behind. Yet there was almost no fighting or local resistance. If the story of his approach to Godfrey for an anti-Greek alliance in January 1097 is credited, the initial delay in the western Balkans is explicable as Bohemund would not wish to become too closely entangled with Greek escorts or garrisons near the capital. Godfrey’s rebuff may have inspired a volte face. As his troops neared Thrace, Bohemund left them under the command of Tancred on 1 April and hurried on to Constantinople, which he reached on 9 April. There, so far from fomenting trouble for Alexius, he proved the emperor’s staunchest ally in the often tetchy negotiations with other leaders. Bohemund spent longer with Alexius than any of the other leaders, almost a full calendar month. He eagerly took an oath of fealty and tried to obtain a future role for himself as military commander or ruler of new conquests in the east as the emperor’s vassal. His efforts to persuade Raymond of Toulouse to come to terms with Alexius and to force Tancred to swear an oath of fealty confirmed his alliance with the emperor. In return, Alexius employed him as his agent with the crusade leaders, Bohemund appearing to have acted as the expedition’s quartermaster for the siege of Nicaea, after which he shared the vanguard of the army with Alexius’s representative Tatikios. When he arrived at Constantinople, without his army, Bohemund was the least powerful of the western magnates at the imperial court; when he left Nicaea less than two months later, he was one of its undoubted leaders. Part, at least, of this must be ascribed to his private diplomacy with Alexius.

Instead of the archetype of a bumptious, threatening and deceitful barbarian as portrayed by Anna Comnena, Bohemund provided a medium of contact between east and west. He was not alone. When Godfrey of Bouillon arrived at Constantinople, he was met by a court official, Roger, son of Dagobert, a Norman who had joined the service of Alexius in the 1080s and progenitor of a family of Greek politicians. Peter of Alifa had fought with Guiscard and Bohemund against Alexius in the 1080s but, with many Italian Normans, had entered imperial service after Guiscard’s death in 1085. Accompanying the crusaders after Nicaea, he received the governorship of Comana in eastern Anatolia, captured by the crusaders in the autumn of 1097, ‘in fealty to God and the Holy Sepulchre, and to our leaders and the emperor’. Peter founded a Byzantine dynasty which adopted the name Petraliphas; both he and Roger, son of Dagobert, later fought for Alexius against Bohemund in the Epirus war of 1107–8.³⁷ Another recruit at Alexius’s court was Bohemund’s own half-brother, Guy; in June 1098, when Alexius decided to withdraw from his projected relief of the crusaders at Antioch, he unavailingly begged the emperor to continue to save his kindred. Another imperial servant was Bohemund’s brother-in-law, William of Grandmesnil from Normandy, who travelled with Tatikios’s Greek division that marched with Bohemund in the vanguard across Asia Minor. Thus, viewed in the perspective of Norman experience, not propaganda, the First Crusade appears as part of an existing process of contact, tension and reaction. When Bohemund arrived in Constantinople in April 1097 and swore fealty to Alexius, his former enemy, he was doing no more than his half-brother and brother-in-law had done before him.

Bohemund’s prominence rested on establishing Byzantine credentials. Alexius need not have trusted him; but he could use him to suit his own purpose of controlling the crusade by proxy. He thought he had achieved this, as he had with so many other Italian Normans, by appealing to Bohemund’s ambition and greed. Bohemund was a highly suitable agent not least because he probably spoke Greek. There is evidence that he read Greek; according to Anna Comnena he could pun in Greek; and a number of western sources indicate that he conversed in Greek with the treacherous Armenian who allowed the crusaders into Antioch in June 1098, Firuz, who expected Bohemund’s troops to do the same. Bohemund’s relatives at Alexius’s court spoke Greek; Tancred apparently could speak Arabic (and did so at Antioch); language skills ran in the family. Indeed, Bohemund itself was a nickname, coined by his father after seeing the size of his infant son; it referred to a legendary giant. The boy had been baptized Mark, a Greek name.³⁸

The timing of arrivals at Constantinople exerted a profound influence on the balance, nature and course of the rest of the expedition. That Alexius had managed to extract oaths from Count Hugh, Duke Godfrey and Bohemund, as well as the count of Flanders, who had left his travelling companions the duke of Normandy and the count of Blois behind in Italy at the turn of the year, and had shipped their troops across the Bosporus by 26 April 1097, presented Raymond of Toulouse with something of a fait accompli when he arrived in the last days of April 1097. As his chaplain recorded, it was reported to Raymond that ‘Bohemund, the duke of Lorraine, the count of Flanders and other princes besought him to make a pact with Alexius’.³⁹ His temper can hardly have been improved by what had proved a long, exhausting and increasingly violent and ill-disciplined march.

Although probably the first magnate to take the cross, and the only one certainly to have had prior warning of