God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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.