At Christmas, when the city still stank of human putrefaction and many knights headed back to Europe, Bohemond and Godfrey’s brother, Baldwin, arrived for their first pilgrimage. The new patriarch of Jerusalem, Daimbert of Pisa, blessed Baldwin as count of Edessa and Bohemond as prince of Antioch.* When Godfrey died in 1100, his brother Baldwin was chosen as king of Jerusalem, founding a French dynasty there, while Bohemond, basing himself in Antioch, expanded his principality – until he was captured that year by a Turkic warlord and held for ransom.* His nephew Tancred, glorying in the title prince of Galilee, served as regent of Antioch until the Giant’s return. Bohemond’s Antiochene principality, to which the family later added Tripoli (Lebanon), lasted more than twice as long as the kingdom of Jerusalem – an eastern branch of the Hautevilles.
Infuriated by ‘that thorough rogue’, Emperor Alexios tried to buy the Giant, but Bohemond instead persuaded King Baldwin to pay his ransom. Needing more cash and knights, Bohemond sailed for Europe where, revelling in his new status, he married the king of France’s daughter Constance, who delivered the required son. Back in Antioch, the Giant set off to attack Alexios, but was defeated and in 1108 forced to submit to the emperor. He died not long afterwards.
By 1118, Alexios too was dying, determined to leave the throne to his son Joannes, known for his dark looks as the Moor and for his measured personality as the Beautiful. His wife still championed her daughter Anna. The night before his father’s death, Joannes pre-empted mother and sister by taking his father’s signet ring and seizing the Great Palace. Anna tried to raise troops and planned a hit on Joannes, who did not attend Alexios’ funeral for fear of assassination. The Beautiful kept the throne, soon uncovering another conspiracy by Anna, who was thereafter confined to a convent.* Joannes and his son Manuel were as capable as their father, doing their best to destroy the Hautevilles, who were meanwhile planning to seize Jerusalem.
From the very start the Hautevilles of Sicily had ruled differently, promoting Arabs and Greeks. When the great count Roger, brother of the Wily and uncle of the Giant, died in 1101, his widow Adelaide ruled on behalf of his sons Simon (briefly) and Roger II. Baldwin of Jerusalem needed cash; Adelaide wanted Jerusalem. Ridding himself of his first wife after a childless marriage, Baldwin wed the thirty-seven-year-old Adelaide, on the understanding that if they had a son he would inherit Jerusalem and, if they did not, Roger II would become king. In Jerusalem, Adelaide was bilked by Baldwin I, then dispatched humiliatingly back to Sicily. Her son Roger was incensed. He claimed Jerusalem, and Antioch on behalf of his younger cousins, a plan foiled by the Antiochene barons who married their heiress Constance (Bohemond’s granddaughter) to a French prince, Raymond of Poitiers.*
The Crusades inspired the stirrings of coordinated Islamic resistance. In 1144, Edessa fell to Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, which served as the catalyst for the second Crusade, led by the pious young Louis VII of France (accompanied by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine) and the king of Germany, Conrad III. Crusader strategists recognized that for the Crusader states – known as Outremer, Across-the-Sea – to survive, they had to win either Syria or Egypt. They chose Syria. Travelling down to Antioch, the monkish Louis was cuckolded by his feisty wife Eleanor, heiress to Aquitaine, who had an affair with her urbane uncle, Raymond. After a rendezvous with the Jerusalemites led by Baldwin III, the three kings bungled their siege of Damascus. Their failure played into the hands of Joannes’ heir Emperor Manuel, who was now able to force the Hautevilles to acknowledge his overlordship.*
Not all the Hautevilles had to compromise. Swarthy and Italianate, taking after his mother rather than the flaxen Hautevilles, Roger II may have been foiled in Outremer but in Sicily and southern Italy he built Europe’s greatest kingdom, a source of much jealousy on the part of German emperors who had been accustomed since the days of Charlemagne and Otto to dominating Italy, and of Roman popes who feared Norman power.
