Georgios Theotokis
Bohemond of Taranto: Crusader and Conqueror
(Pen & Sword, 2021), 208 pp. £19.99
Georgios Theotokis’ timely monograph comes to fill (but, by design, only partially) a gap in the recent anglophone scholarship on the First Crusade.
In his own time, Bohemond (d.1111), son of Guiscard, was notorious across Europe: the Gesta Francorum, the first account of the conquest of Jerusalem to reach it, was probably authored by a man of his own following; his fame was such that, according to Orderic Vitalis, King Henry II of England forbade him from entering the kingdom, for fear he would charm his noblemen and knights and persuade them to go on crusade with him. Bohemond looms large in histories of the First Crusade: as a Norman from Southern Italy, he had a privileged relationship with the Byzantine Empire (in good and evil) as shown by Peter Frankopan’s recent work from the perspective of the Eastern Mediterranean (The First Crusade: The Call from the East, 2012). Nonetheless, despite presenting a fertile topic for the scholar, Bohemond had so far last been an object of interest in 1917, with Yewdale’s monograph (Bohemond I, prince of Antioch, derived from his dissertation), which, while still thorough in its exploration of the primary sources, is now extremely old. The last few years have in fact seen two very different biographies of Bohemond, neither of which, unfortunately, is available in English. Jean Flori’s Bohemond d’Antioche: chevalier d’aventure (2006) engaged with Bohemond from a Francophone viewpoint, reading his much-discussed career through the prism of contemporary chivalric culture and the Continental European perspective Bohemond sought in the last years of his life. Luigi Russo’s meticulously researched Boemondo. Figlio del Guiscardo e principe di Antiochia (2009), instead, is fully immersed in the often-understudied Italian context, re-contextualising Bohemond within the perspective of his family’s holdings in the Mezzogiorno.
Georgios Theotokis, in his own words, sets out instead to produce a military history, focused on the tactical and strategic practice of Bohemond’s military career. In this, he succeeds fully: the book is both a highly readable narrative history and an engaged study of Bohemond the warrior leader, an aspect which, as the wealth of sources Theotokis draws on shows, was object of intent fascination and discussion in his own days. Theotokis builds on the work done in his first monograph (The Norman Campaigns in the Balkans, 1081-1108, 2014) in order to continue to expand on his engagement with Southern Norman warfare in the Mediterranean, and he brings to the subject both this confidence and ease with the topic, and his familiarity with specialistic texts such as military manuals, and a closer knowledge of the Byzantine perspective. The volume, aided by plentiful and detailed maps and illustrations, gives us a thorough impression of the way in which the campaigns which shaped Bohemond’s life took place.
The book opens with an ‘Introduction’ which both lays out the intended goals of the volume, and the sources the author will be engaging with. This segues into the first chapter, which sets the stage for Bohemond’s life by contextualising him within his family, the Hautevilles, who by the end of the 11th century controlled all of Southern Italy and Sicily. While the chapter is brief, it lays out effectively the picture of Bohemond, the first son of Robert Guiscard (duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily) by his first wife, Alberada, whom Robert set aside in order to marry Lombard princess Sichelgaita. Meeting Guiscard, and his successful campaigns of conquest across Southern Italy, set the stage for one of the book’s points of strength: the examination of Guiscard’s two campaigns in the Balkans, in which Bohemond played a prominent role. It has often proven an issue in scholarship on crusader leaders that much more space has been dedicated to their crusader career (which often came later in their life) than to what had preceded it: this is most assuredly a pitfall Theotokis does not fall into.
Chapters 2 and 3 explore at length, first the 1081-3 campaign, and then the 1082-4 period. Chapter 2 is particularly noteworthy for its in-depth detour into the complex politics of the Byzantine Empire at the time of Guiscard’s invasion. Theotokis lays out the alternance of power following the deposition of Michael VII, before introducing us to the ways in which the campaign was plotted over the geography of the area, using Corfu as a bridge-head into the Balkans. At the same time, the empire was threatened by its Turkish neighbours, and the volume paints a convincing picture of the Emperor Alexios as a man taken between two fires, contextualising the examination of his response and victory at Dyrrachium in both an analysis of his daughter and historian Anna Komnene’s account and the military manuals of the period. Chapter 3 brings us through the second, wearying campaign, which stretched over a winter and saw several indecisive engagements. Here Theotokis’ work is particularly good in grappling with the near-total absent of sources, save the Alexias alone: Bohemond’s life at this point was that of a subordinate under Guiscard, and Guiscard’s wars and perspectives loom large.
Chapter 4 takes us back to Italy, where Bohemond attempted to carve himself a dominion, despite meeting staunch opposition from his half-brother Roger Borsa (who had inherited the duchy) and his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, who supported Borsa’s bid. One wishes the volume lingered more on this, comparatively much lesser known, period of Bohemond’s life. The author here brings together expressively the sources, but he could insert himself more forcefully on debates as to how soon, often, and seriously Bohemond rebelled, and with the enduring question as to whether he in fact bore the title of prince of Taranto. (The decisive discussion, here, is by Luigi Russo: Theotokis is aware of his argument that the title was spurious, made up in the later Middle Ages, but he only mentions this, in passing, in a footnote). Particularly useful here, however, is the exploration of the routine presence of Muslim troops in Southern Italy. The chapter shows us Bohemond fighting several times alongside the Muslims in his uncle’s forces, and discusses the larger integration of Sicilian troops into Southern Italian warfare.
Chapter 5 brings us to the beginning of the crusade, and Bohemond’s departure for the East. The secondary evidence is effectively marshalled together here in order to show Bohemond calling together the least satisfied of the Southern Italian knights of his time, in order to cross the Adriatic and resume the fight against the Byzantine empire. Theotokis avoids getting mired in the usual discussion as to how interested Bohemond was (or was not) in the idea of crusade, by highlighting the coherence with his former plan of action. The book achieves some of its best analysis when tackling Bohemond’s relationship with the Byzantine Empire, and it is thus a limit that it engages with Anna Komnene’s account of the period with the apparent lack of sympathy very common in crusades scholarship concerning it. Despite his deeper interest in the Byzantine perspective, Theotokis is palpably impatient with the historian’s unsympathetic attitude to Bohemond: a pity, as it sets up the text to visibly strain against a source which it can otherwise analyse effectively for the purposes of military history.
Chapter 6 encounters the well-trodden ground of the siege of Antioch, but successfully avoids staleness by both focusing closely on the Byzantine perspective, and going down to brass tacks with the mechanic of the siege, continuing in the highly detailed military discussion coherent throughout the text. The re-examination of the divisive figure of Tatikios, the Byzantine envoy much-maligned by crusader chroniclers, is here fundamental, showing the potential of Bohemond’s perspective to revisit productively contentious points in the narrative of the First Crusade.
Chapter 7 deals with Bohemond’s time as lord of Antioch, and his captivity: the author is here straining against the lack of sources, but still pulls together as clear a picture as possible of this period in Bohemond’s life. Chapter 8 contains a particularly good discussion of the papacy in relation to Bohemond’s decision to raise an anti-Byzantine expedition in Europe. Here, the idea of what makes (and doesn’t make) a crusade is debated extensively, to segue into the detailed account of Bohemond’s final, failed bid against the Empire. The Epilogue then wraps up the narrative with Bohemond’s final, defeated years in Apulia, and his discreet burial in the small centre of Canosa. While the final years of Bohemond’s life are in many ways far less known than his earlier ones, Theotokis is at pains to show that while it was his reputation as a crusader that most shaped Bohemond’s perception in his own time, his crusader activity was in fact part of a much larger, and coherent, plan of expansion nested in his father’s own campaigns, and produces a thorough narrative which establishes his subject as an engaged, alert, and constantly active agent on the Mediterranean theatre.
This new biography of Bohemond does much for renewing interest in the topic: an approachable work, its thorough engagement with the primary sources, and well-informed take on strategic and tactical issues, will make it a volume of interest to specialists in military history, and contributes another point of entry into Bohemond’s well-publicised, often controversial, but still much to be discussed career.
Francesca Petrizzo
Institute for Medieval Studies
University of Leeds
