Principality of Antioch

Also known as Principatus Antiochiae

The Norman-founded northern Crusader state with its capital at Antioch — held for 170 years before Baybars took the city in 1268.

The Principality of Antioch was founded by Bohemond of Taranto, the Norman commander of the southern Italian contingent of the First Crusade, after the long siege of the city in 1097–98. Bohemond seized Antioch by clandestine arrangement with a tower captain on 3 June 1098, then defended it against a relief army from Mosul; he refused to hand the city back to the Byzantine emperor Alexios I despite earlier oaths and made it the seat of his own dynasty.

Antioch was the most Byzantine in flavour of the Frankish states — its principal subject populations were Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Syriac, and its rulers maintained an uneasy combination of feudal homage to Constantinople and Latin lordship over the local elites. Through the 12th century it was repeatedly torn between Antiochene and Byzantine claims and held off (and was sometimes overrun by) Aleppine and Mosuli incursions. The principality reached its territorial peak in the 1130s and again, in a smaller form, after the Third Crusade.

Mamluk pressure under Baybars took the inland fortresses and the great port of Latakia in the 1260s; Antioch itself fell on 18 May 1268, in one of the cruellest sacks of the period. Some chroniclers report a casualty list and slave-haul larger than at any single Crusader-era capture. After 1268 the principality survived only as a title held by the Lusignan kings of Cyprus.

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