Bohemond of Taranto: Crusader and Conqueror

By Georgios Theotokis

“A brilliant picture of a great medieval warrior and crusader, clear and concise, which brings to life the whole Mediterranean world in an age of crisis” (John France, author of Perilous Glory).

Bohemond of Taranto, Lord of Antioch, was the unofficial leader of the First Crusade. A man of boundless ambition and inexhaustible energy, he was one of the most remarkable warriors in medieval Mediterranean history. While he failed in his quest to secure the Byzantine throne, he succeeded in founding the most enduring of all the crusader states. In this authoritative biography, Georgios Theotokis presents a detailed portrait of Bohemond as a soldier and commander.

Covering Taranto’s contribution to the crusades, Theotokis focuses on his military achievements in Italy, Sicily, the Balkans, and Anatolia. Since medieval commanders generally receive little credit for their strategic understanding, Theotokis examines Bohemond’s war-plans in his many campaigns, describing how he adapted his battle-tactics when facing different opponents and considering whether his approach to war was typical of the Norman commanders of his time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526744296

Book preview

Bohemond of Taranto

Bohemond of Taranto

Crusader and Conqueror

Georgios Theotokis

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire – Philadelphia

Copyright © Georgios Theotokis, 2020

ISBN 978-1-52674-428-9

ePUB ISBN 978-1-5267-4429-6

Mobi ISBN 978-1-5267-4430-2

The right of Georgios Theotokis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To my Brigita – for ever

Contents

List of Maps

List of Plates

Introduction

1. Early Life and Kin Dynamics

2. The Norman Invasion of the Balkans, 1081–83

3. The Norman Invasion of the Balkans, 1082–84

4. The Interlude Period, 1085–97

5. The Crusader – From Italy to the City

6. The Crusader – Conquering Antioch

7. Lord of Antioch

8. Back to Europe

Epilogue: Death and Heritage

Notes

Bibliography

Plates

List of Maps

The area around Dyrrachium

The Albanian river system

The southern Balkans

The route of the First Crusade

The Middle East

List of Plates

Archangel Michael and Joshua, Church of St George Diasorites, Naxos island, southern Aegean Sea. A rare surviving example of a cross-in-square type of Byzantine church built and decorated in the second half of the eleventh century (probably in the early Komnenian period).

St George and St Demetrius, Church of St Anargyroi, Kastoria, western Macedonia,c. 1160–80, depicted as typical mid-twelfth-century Byzantine cavalry officers.

Joshua, monastery of St Lucas in Veotea, central Greece, twelfth century, depicted as a Byzantine infantry soldier.

Battle scene between units of Byzantine and Arab cavalry from an illuminated manuscript, the ‘Madrid Skylitzes’, twelfth century.

Bohemond and Patriarch Daimbert of Pisa on their way to the Holy Land.

Battle scenes depicting Norman soldiers, Church of St Nicolas in Bari, eleventh century.

Mount Demirkazik (3,756m) in the Aladaglar mountains, Niğde Province, Turkey, part of the formidable Taurus mountains separating Anatolia from Upper Mesopotamia and Syria.

Aerial view of the castle of St George in Kephalonia, Ionian Sea, which was built by the Byzantines in the eleventh century.

The Via Egnatia in the river valley of the Skhumbi, resurfaced by the Italian military in 1940.

The medieval walls of Dyrrachium (modern Durrës).

The river Vjosë upstream from Tepelenë, Albania.

The mausoleum of Bohemond in Canosa di Puglia.

The tower of Bohemond in the castle of Ioannina.

Castle of St Marco Argentano.

Roman caltrops.

The liberation of Bohemond from his captivity by the Danishmendits. Image from the illuminated manuscript, Maître du Roman de Fauvel, ‘Libération de Bohémond’, ‘Li rommans de Godefroy de Buillon et de Salehadin et de tous lez autres roys qui ont esté outre mer jusques a saint Loys qui darrenierem’ (BnF 22495).

Introduction

We were sprung from poor and obscure parents, and leaving the barren fields of the Cotentin and homes ill supplied with the means of existence, we set out for Rome, and it was not without great difficulty and much alarm that we passed beyond that place. Afterwards, by God’s aid, we got possession of many great cities.

[Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, p. 369]

The Aims and Scope of the Book

Bohemond of Taranto was a man of boundless ambition and inexhaustible energy; he was, in the words of Romuald of Salerno, ‘always seeking the impossible’. If he failed, however, to conquer the Byzantine empire and establish his own great eastern empire, he did succeed in founding the most enduring of all the states in the Latin East. He proved to be one of the most remarkable warriors in medieval Mediterranean history, coming from a family of ‘soldiers of fortune’, the Hautevilles, who managed to establish a powerful principality in Italy and seriously threaten the Byzantine empire’s very existence.

Remarkably very few monographs have been devoted to this chevalier d’aventure (Jean Flori) and Ralph Yewdale published the only one in English more than a century ago, in 1917. Since then, Jean Flori has published a modern, although dense and difficult to read, examination of Bohemond’s life and career in French. This was supplemented, in 2008, by an updated and compelling biography of the Norman in Italian by Luigi Russo. Yet the aim of this book is to write about ‘the great son of Guiscard’ as a warrior – in a sense, minimising his political and diplomatic ‘machinations’ or his contribution to the holy war in the Middle East and focusing instead on his military achievements in Italy, Sicily, the Balkans, Anatolia and the Middle East.

Bohemond was famous for being one of the most experienced officers in the crusader army and the undisputed leader because he ‘knew’ the enemy. He had fought in Italy and Sicily against the local Lombard and Arab levies, while he was the second-in-command (later to become the leader) of the Norman armies that invaded Byzantine Illyria twice in three decades to face the multi-cultural armies of the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos, comprising Greek, Armenian and Turkish troops. Therefore, because medieval commanders have in general received little credit for their strategic understanding, I want to focus on Bohemond’s career as:

•a strategist : analysing his war-plans in different operational theatres (Italy, Balkans, Middle East) and examining which strategy he follows – annihilation, exhaustion or attrition? I will attempt to elucidate the degree to which one can characterise the Norman – and more specifically Bohemond’s – strategies in Italy, Sicily and the Balkans as ‘Vegetian’.

•a tactician : studying Bohemond’s deployment and employment of troops in actual fighting against different enemies in different operational theatres. How well does he adapt his battle-tactics to those of the enemy? How well does he ‘know’ the enemy (reconnaissance, diplomacy, espionage, etc.)? How suitable were these tactics for the warfare in each region?

•a trans-cultural warrior : How typical a ‘Norman’ warrior was Bohemond? While the many ‘cultures of war’ that emerged in the medieval world shared some basic characteristics, what is more broadly comparable are the processes or dynamics that shaped military cultures around the world. More specifically, in this monograph I will explore those dynamics and the cultural patterns they produced by focusing on Bohemond’s military career in regions that were hotly contested in the Middle Ages – the Italian Peninsula, Sicily and the opposite Adriatic coast, and the Middle East.

The Norman Expansion out of Normandy

In his monumental The Making of Europe, Robert Bartlett wrote, ‘one of the more striking aspects of the expansionary activity of the tenth to thirteenth centuries was the movement of western European aristocrats from their homelands into new areas where they settled and, if successful, augmented their fortunes’. He was referring to the medieval aristocratic expansion from the core of Europe’s old ‘Carolingian lands’ into its periphery – eastern and southern Europe and, of course, the Middle East. Men of Norman descent became lords in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, in southern Italy and Sicily, in Spain and Syria. One Norman adventurer became lord of Tarragona and a Poitevin family attained the crown of Cyprus.

However, what were the reasons behind this migration of these ‘medieval warriors’ to the Mediterranean in the first half of the eleventh century? One factor would have been pilgrimage. Although the religious importance of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northwestern Spain, is indisputable, Italy was the crossing point of every major pilgrimage route leading to the Holy Land. Furthermore, religious visitors could perform their pious duty at the Sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo sul Gargano in northern Apulia, and the Normans appear as pilgrims in two of the three relatively different versions mentioning the coming of the Normans to Italy around the year 1000.

Another contributing factor to the Norman migration would have been the overpopulation of Normandy. In the last speech that Orderic Vitalis puts into the mouth of Robert Guiscard in July 1085, we read: ‘We were sprung from poor and obscure parents, and leaving the barren fields of the Cotentin and homes ill supplied with the means of existence, we set out for Rome . . . Afterwards, by God’s aid, we got possession of many great cities.’ Similar accounts underline the fact that the division of the family patrimony was a serious issue in eleventh-century Normandy and that customs of inheritance dashed the aspirations of many younger sons to acquire a piece of land for themselves.

The driving force behind the expansion of the 1020s–50s, however, was the political and social disturbances in many parts of northern France after the breakdown of Robert II’s regime in 1034. In fact, there seems to be a link between periods of particular disturbance in the duchy of Normandy and periods of expansion in Italy. For example, the period of the growing power of Rainulf of Aversa (second half of 1030s) and the establishment of the Normans at Melfi (1041) were preceded by the troubled reign of Richard III (1034–35) and the minority years of William II.

Finally, recent studies have dashed the myth of this being a period of a purely Norman ‘invasion’ of southern lands. Italian sources and charter evidence contain numerous references to newcomers from other parts of France.¹ In the last twenty years it has become clear that approximately one in three of the ‘invaders’ were of non-Norman origin and, more specifically, from Normandy’s neighbouring regions including Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Chartres, or even from further south, like Burgundy and Champagne.

The Normans in Italy, Eleventh Century

The Normans are first attested in southern Italy in early 999, when a group of Norman pilgrims came to the support of the local population in Salerno who were being attacked by marauding Arab raiders from the emirate of Sicily. Several other Normans became involved in the revolt of Melus of Bari against Byzantine rule in Apulia in the years 1017–18. As a direct result of this impromptu military involvement, other Normans arrived in Italy, no longer as pilgrims but as mercenaries recruited by local Lombard princes. By the end of the 1020s the numbers of men under the command of Rainulf, the future (after 1030) count of Aversa, swelled following the death of Duke Robert II of Normandy in 1035 and the minority years of his son William. Yet they were still not the main players in the political insurrection against Byzantine authority in Apulia; rather they were taking the side of the highest bidder.

The Norman establishment in Aversa, north of Naples, in 1030 and in Melfi, in the Apulian-Campanian borders, in 1041 would have profound long-term socio-political consequences for the area. In fact, the Normans were only 500 strong when they established themselves in Melfi, being heavily outnumbered by their enemies. In the short term, however, the Byzantines reacted sharply and confronted the united Lombard-Norman forces in two pitched battles at Olivento (17 March 1041) and Ofanto (4 May 1041), followed by a third at Montepeloso in early autumn. Although the Normans emerged victorious, at this early stage of their expansion into Italy these newcomers were still divided, with the two most powerful groups being those in Aversa and Melfi, with other smaller bands operating independently in the Capitanata and northern Campania. Finally, the Norman victory over the papal army led by Leo IX at Civitate in 1053 firmly established the Normans in southern Italy by opening the way for further conquests in every direction.

In 1059 at Melfi Robert Guiscard made peace with Pope Nicholas II, to whom he swore an oath of fealty. Robert was invested as duke of Apulia and Calabria, while Richard, count of Aversa and son of Rainulf, was acknowledged as prince of Capua, having captured that city in the previous year. Robert Guiscard’s crowning achievement on mainland Italy was the conquest of the Byzantine capital Bari after a prolonged siege between 1068 and 1071, during which he did his best to exploit the internal divisions of the local inhabitants.

The fertile and strategically important island of Sicily was conquered over a period of more than thirty years from the first invasion in 1061, followed by the conquest of Palermo in 1071–72. However, the three major pitched battles in this operational theatre that took place in the first decade of the Norman expansion reveal the weaknesses of the Norman leaders, Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, in managing the invasion of an island so far from their bases on the Italian mainland. In no case were the Normans able to put into the field more than a few hundred mounted horsemen, while every winter the mounting casualties had to be replaced by shipping in fresh troops from Calabria and Apulia. Finally, in order to diminish the numerical superiority of their enemies and take full advantage of the mobility of their cavalry, they chose relatively broken, hilly or marshy terrain, that was also dominated by a river or an uphill castle, as in the battles of Castrogiovanni (1061) and Cerami (1063) in the heart of the island.

An Introduction to the Narrative Sources

The basic primary sources for the Norman expansion in Italy and Sicily, and their invasions in the Balkans, include mainly those authors who wrote in Latin, including Amatus of Montecassino, William of Apulia and Geoffrey Malaterra, and the sole author who wrote in Greek, Anna Komnena. The former is the author of the earliest of the three substantial narrative accounts of the conquest of southern Italy by the ‘peoples beyond the Alps’ in the eleventh century. The History of the Normans² was probably completed shortly after the last event mentioned, the death of Richard I, hence around 1078/9. William of Apulia wrote a poem in hexameters (‘epic verse’) about The Deeds of Robert Guiscard,³ probably between 1096 and 1099, although the poem is not exclusively concerned with the life of the duke of Apulia and Calabria. William seems to have been a member of Roger Borsa’s court and was probably a layman, although his full identity remains elusive. He was obviously well informed about the Byzantine Empire, but his contemporary sources remain difficult to identify. Geoffrey Malaterra is the third chronicler to commemorate the conquest of Italy and Sicily by the Normans, and indeed the only one whose focus is Roger Hauteville. Malaterra notes that he was a ‘new-comer’ to the region, and that he almost certainly had come to Sicily sometime after 1091 at the request of Count Roger, who wished to reestablish the power and influence of the Latin Church on the island. His The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of his Brother Duke Robert Guiscard was completed in the closing years of the eleventh century.⁴

Anna Komnena, one of the most important and influential historiographers of Byzantine literature, was the first-born child of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. She was born on 1 December 1083 and at the age of 8 was betrothed to Constantine Doukas, the son of the deposed emperor Michael VII Doukas. A highly educated princess, Anna may have started compiling her Alexiad⁵ after the death of her husband Nicephorus Bryennius in 1137, but it seems more likely that she waited for her brother John (Emperor John II, reigned 1118–43) to pass away in 1143. Therefore, the work was completed within five years, since we understand that the fourteenth of her fifteen books was finished in 1148. Anna’s position in the imperial court brought her into close contact with many leading figures of the empire, including her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, her uncle and governor of Dyrrachium, George Palaeologus, her husband and trusted senior official Nicephorus Bryennius, her grandmother and regent Anna Dalassena, Empress Irene, and Tatikios, who was Alexios’ representative to the Latin Armies of the First Crusade. Her high position would have allowed her access to imperial archives and state correspondence. She also gathered useful information from eyewitnesses, as she herself describes: ‘My material [. . .] has been gathered [. . .] from old soldiers who were serving in the army at the time of my father’s accession, who fell on hard times and exchanged the turmoil of the outer world for the peaceful life of monks.’ Finally, she was an eyewitness herself in a number of events at which ‘most of the time [. . .] we were ourselves present, for we accompanied our father and mother. Our lives by no means revolved round the home.’⁶

Chapter 1

Early Life and Kin Dynamics

A Portrait of Bohemond

Now the man [Bohemond] was such as, to put it briefly, had never before been seen in the land of the Romans, be he either of the barbarians or of the Greeks (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying). Let me describe the barbarian’s appearance more particularly – he was so tall in stature that he over-topped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor over weighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned and, one might say, built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus. He had powerful hands and stood firmly on his feet, and his neck and back were well compacted. An accurate observer would notice that he stooped slightly, but this was not from any weakness of the vertebrae of his spine but he had probably had this posture slightly from birth. His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk; most likely it too was reddish. His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the air freely; his chest corresponded to his nostrils and by his nostrils . . . the breadth of his chest. For by his nostrils nature had given free passage for the high spirit which bubbled up from his heart. A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible. For in the whole of his body the entire man shewed implacable and savage both in his size and glance, methinks, and even his laughter sounded to others like snorting. He was so made in mind and body that both courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war. His wit was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape [lit. ‘handle’] in every emergency. In conversation he was well informed, and the answers he gave were quite irrefutable. This man who was of such a size and such a character was inferior to the Emperor alone in fortune and eloquence and in other gifts of nature.¹

This lengthy and intimate portrait is undoubtedly the best description of Bohemond’s physical appearance that has been saved for posterity, written down some eight-and-a-half centuries ago by the Byzantine princess Anna, the eldest child of the Emperor Alexios Komnenos (r. 1081–1118). She delivered this description of her father’s nemesis in Book XIII, one of the last books of her monumental historical and biographical text, written around the year 1148 and named the Alexiad after her father. But although Bohemond appears in Anna’s work as early as Book IV, by the time the historian evidently thought it was time for her to deliver this detailed picture of her villain-hero, the Norman had already submitted to her father’s envoys on the outskirts of the Illyrian port-city of Dyrrachium (modern Durrës in Albania).

What immediately follows the portrait of Bohemond is the famous Treaty of Devol (Diabolis), drawn up in September 1108 between the Norman and Alexios, under the terms of which ‘second pact’ [following Bohemond’s formal submission to Alexios in 1097], ‘I [Bohemond] shall become the liege-man of Your Highnesses [Alexios and John Komnenoi].’² Therefore, in this contest between the two great antagonists, Anna leaves no doubt as to who eventually triumphed over whom, and through her desire to magnify her father’s political and, more importantly, military success over this imposing barbarian in the eyes and ears of her audience, she ingeniously chose to place the physical description of the Norman count immediately after his defeat and surrender to the true hero of her work, her father.

It is not until he becomes a crusader in the summer of 1096 that Bohemond draws Anna’s virulent attacks; after that, no colours are too dark for painting him! However, he is not the only westerner to incur the princess’s sarcastic, derogatory or downright hateful comments. The Latin peoples of the West, who are called indiscriminately Latins, Franks or Celts, are all ‘barbarians’ as far as she is concerned. Anna ascribes to them numerous unpleasant attributes: they are ‘shameless and reckless ’, but they are also ‘greedy of money ’, and ‘immoderate in everything they wish’, and this – naturally – made them ‘unstable and easily led’.³ This implies that the Franks would change sides even during battle to serve the highest bidder, thus discarding any previous agreements with former allies.⁴

Nevertheless, Anna admits on several occasions that the Franks were brave and daring, though untamed and undisciplined, especially when on horseback.⁵ Their impetuous nature and lust for battle and bloodshed, along with other characteristics like their ‘hot-headedness ’ and ‘eagerness ’ for glory which made them ‘uncontrollable ’, all of these bear down to one of the three distinct components of ethnicity in the Middle Ages; the first two were the idea of a nation’s common descent (usually going back to a mythical figure), followed by a shared language, but I will not elaborate on these two here; the third one was that each people had its own distinct characteristics, both physical and mental, and this is a fundamental idea behind the formation of the notion of the ‘invincibility’ on the battlefield of the Frankish and Norman nations.⁶

In the Middle Ages there was a widespread belief that physical appearance was transmitted by heredity, which in turn was determined by climactic and geographical factors. In fact, Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (written in the early seventh century AD), the first work of ‘universal knowledge [summa]’, was the standard medieval work of reference for the creation and