God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Bohemund of Taranto is the most controversial leader of the First Crusade. Of all the major surviving commanders, he alone failed to join the march to Jerusalem in 1099, more concerned with securing his hold over Syrian Antioch. Admired for his generalship, his pious credentials have been impugned in the light of his priorities in 1099 and his career of attempting to carve out for himself a kingdom in the Balkans at the expense of the Byzantine empire. The traditional view sees his motives as basely material, in contrast to the supposedly more elevated inspirations of some of his colleagues. This is untenable. The psychologies of the crusade’s leaders cannot be 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