#bohemond of taranto

[illustratus]

Bohemond Mounting the Ramparts of Antioch (First Crusade) by Gustave Doré

[dijeh]

The First Crusade: The Call from the East, Peter Frankopan

[natequarter]

if i had the time to make the perfect Vaguely Orientalist Documentary parody, it would look something like this: we open on lush views of the australian outback. playing in the background is some bollywood music. some educated white man is narrating about how the arabs, who worship but one god - zeus - are disorganised and backwards, and conclude with the valiant duel between the handsome and charming bohemond of taranto and the less handsome and less charming kerbogha of mosul. lots of half-naked shots of oily men wrestling. then we will move on to the second crusade. this time, we will open on the american prairie land. the narrator informs the viewer that much has changed from the first crusade (whilst egyptian music plays in the background): the arabs now worship odin and richard the lionheart has come to invade. this continues on for each crusade, and after the third crusade every muslim is simply called saladin, regardless of their actual name, with the music, visuals, and general historical accuracy getting further and further away from any kind of sense. by the seventh crusade elizabeth i will be leading the crusade against saladin against a backdrop of norway in winter whilst greensleeves plays. thomas asbridge will be weeping in a corner. white documentary makers will look on in horror. and somewhere in the middle east or possibly not, saladin will awaken for the final battle...

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 7.1 (before 1870)

69 – Tiberius Julius Alexander orders his Roman legions in Alexandria to swear allegiance to Vespasian as Emperor. 552 – Battle of Taginae: Byzantine forces under Narses defeat the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the Ostrogoth king, Totila, is mortally wounded. 1097 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Crusaders led by prince Bohemond of Taranto defeat a Seljuk army led by sultan Kilij Arslan I. 1431 – The Battle of La Higueruela takes place in Granada, leading to a modest advance of the Kingdom of Castile during the Reconquista. 1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan after nightfall. 1523 – Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos become the first Lutheran martyrs, burned at the stake by Roman Catholic authorities in Brussels. 1569 – Union of Lublin: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania confirm a real union; the united country is called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations. 1643 – First meeting of the Westminster Assembly, a council of theologians ("divines") and members of the Parliament of England appointed to restructure the Church of England, at Westminster Abbey in London. 1690 – War of the Grand Alliance: Marshal de Luxembourg triumphs over an Anglo-Dutch army at the battle of Fleurus. 1690 – Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne in Ireland (as reckoned under the Julian calendar). 1766 – François-Jean de la Barre, a young French nobleman, is tortured and beheaded before his body is burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France. 1770 – Lexell's Comet is seen closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 astronomical units (2,180,000 km; 1,360,000 mi). 1782 – Raid on Lunenburg: American privateers attack the British settlement of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. 1819 – Johann Georg Tralles discovers the Great Comet of 1819, (C/1819 N1). It is the first comet analyzed using polarimetry, by François Arago. 1823 – The five Central American nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica declare independence from the First Mexican Empire after being annexed the year prior. 1837 – A system of civil registration of births, marriages and deaths is established in England and Wales. 1855 – Signing of the Quinault Treaty: The Quinault and the Quileute cede their land to the United States. 1858 – Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society of London. 1862 – The Russian State Library is founded as the Library of the Moscow Public Museum. 1862 – Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, second daughter of Queen Victoria, marries Prince Louis of Hesse, the future Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. 1862 – American Civil War: The Battle of Malvern Hill takes place. It is the last of the Seven Days Battles, part of George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. 1863 – Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) in Suriname, marking the abolition of slavery by the Netherlands. 1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Gettysburg begins. 1867 – The British North America Act takes effect as the Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia join into confederation to create the modern nation of Canada. John A. Macdonald is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada. This date is commemorated annually in Canada as Canada Day, a national holiday.

[aicollider]

You are in the middle of the First Crusade, Siege of Jerusalem (1099 CE)

As you look out from behind the walls of Jerusalem, you can see the Christian armies of the First Crusade camped outside the city. They are led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert Curthose, Bohemond of Taranto, and other renowned knights. You can also see that the army of Jerusalem led by Iftikhar al-Dawla is vastly outnumbered. You estimate that there are at least 20,000…

[erotetica]

ik the Genovese sailed direct to Jerusalem, but I can prove Nicolo went the long way, bc you know he doesn’t think a pilgrimage counts unless you’re starving outside Antioch, gnawing nettles. Yusuf wakes up after his first death and he can’t think of anything flowery or existential abt his new rival, just ‘who microwaved this muppet’

[historiandshenanigans]

1. Bohemond of Taranto

2. Raymond of Saint-Gilles

3. Godfrey of Bouillon

4. Hugh of Vermandois

The leaders of the four ‘official’ armies for the fisrt crusade, which departed for Byzantium in August 1096.

http://herodotohistoriant.blogspot.com/2016/03/bohemundo-de-tarento-principe-de.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh,_Count_of_Vermandois#/media/File:Hugh_I_of_Vermandois.jpg

https://eduardocallaey.blogspot.com/2011/07/godofredo-de-bouillon-senor-de-las.html

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raimundo_IV_de_Tolosa#/media/Archivo:Raymond_IV_of_Toulouse.jpg

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 by Jonathan Riley-Smith ★★★★☆

It often happens that research which is embarked on with a particular intention ends in a book about something else. I began by wanting to discover, if I could, some of the reasons why men and women took the cross during the first few decades of crusading, but in the course of my work I found myself being confronted by the sight of a few closely related families attaining a dominant position. Their ascent came into focus for me because I happened to have become interested in the circumstances which made it possible: the religious and social environment in which men committed themselves to a crusade and geared themselves up to take part in it, the experiences and attitudes of the survivors, and the ties between the settlers in the newly conquered Latin territories in the East and their homelands. The families concerned came from emergent nobility of moderate status. What was there in early crusading — in the ideology and the responses of nobles and knights to it, in the details of the preparations, and in the reactions of the survivors to their experiences — which made the movement susceptible to a takeover of this sort? I have tried to answer that question in this book.

... What drove so many men and women to take part in enterprises which were often as unpleasant for them as they were for their opponents and victims? The motives of crusaders have been a subject for debate since the movement began. In the early twelfth century, the chronicler Albert of Aachen portrayed a North Italian priest saying, “Men hold to different opinions about this journey. Some say that this desire to go has been aroused in all pilgrims by God and the Lord Jesus Christ; others that it was through lightheadedness that the Frankish magnates and the multitudes were moved, and that it was because of this that so many pilgrims encountered obstacles in Hungary and in other kingdoms, so that they could not fulfill their vows.”

... The evidence for the armsbearers being knowingly engaged from the first in a colonial venture is even weaker than that for the poor or the merchants. There is a hostile contemporary reference to Bohemond of Taranto in the Gesta of Geoffrey Malaterra, a Norman monk settled in southern Italy and a partisan of Bohemond's uncle and political opponent, Roger I of Sicily. Geoffrey stated bluntly that Bohemond took the cross only because he wanted to carve a territory for himself out of the Byzantine empire... Bohemond was a disappointed man, whose father had left him his conquests from the Greeks on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, which were soon lost, while his younger half-brother had inherited the duchy of Apulia. He had created a large and possibly independent principality for himself in the far south of Italy, including the cities of Bari and Taranto, but he did not have the status he must have craved; an admirer wrote of him that he was “always seeking the impossible”. Another man who may have been after a principality elsewhere was Baudouin of Boulogne, whose elder brothers were count of Boulogne and duke of Lower Lorraine. He had also been disappointed at home because as someone originally destined for the Church he had not shared in the partition of the family lands. But otherwise there is little to go on. Even the Montlhéry clan, which was to exploit the movement in such an extraordinary way, seems at first to have been drawn to crusading primarily by its spiritual benefits.

[tlaquetzqui]

Just saw some fucker’s post about a board-game where you play as Crusaders looting the Holy Land. Like…in the year 20fucking20? Seriously? Have you heard about plate tectonics and the discovery of DNA, or is history the only discipline you’re mired in the 1950s views on?

The Crusades were actually viewed as a charity. People lost money on them, lots of money; Crusaders mortgaged their property to the hilt to fund the expeditions. Absolutely nobody went out with the goal of profiting by them, though a few (Bohemond of Taranto and Raymond of Toulouse, in the First Crusade) did try to advance their political position through them—exactly as they might advance their political position by endowing a monastery, a cathedral, or a hospital.

If you do not know the Crusades were about helping Byzantium fight off a Selçuk Turkish (later also Egyptian Mameluke and Ayyubid Kurdish) invasion, you do not even know what “Crusades” were. “World War Two was about helping Stalin take over Eastern Europe” is a less disgustingly inaccurate understanding of that war than you people apparently have of the Crusades, since at least that was the actual result of World War Two, and nobody actually did profit by the Crusades, let alone that being their intention.

[theperfumeoftraitors]

“Now the man was such as, to put it briefly, had never before been seen in the land of the Romans, be he either of the barbarians or of the Greeks (for he was a marvel for the eyes to behold, and his reputation was terrifying). Let me describe the barbarian's appearance more particularly – he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned and, one might say, built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus... His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk... His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the air freely; his chest corresponded to his nostrils and by his nostrils...the breadth of his chest. For by his nostrils nature had given free passage for the high spirit which bubbled up from his heart. A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible... He was so made in mind and body that both courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war. His wit was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape in every emergency. In conversation he was well informed, and the answers he gave were quite irrefutable. This man who was of such a size and such a character was inferior to the Emperor alone in fortune and eloquence and in other gifts of nature.”

Byzantine Princess Anna Komnene commenting on Bohemond I who was the Prince of Taranto from 1089 to 1111 and the Prince of Antioch from 1098 to 1111. He was a leader of the First Crusade, The Norman monarchy he founded in Antioch arguably outlasted those of England and of Sicily.

[everknight]

         nicolo grew up in the taranto, by the sea.  he’d decided early on that he wanted to be a knight.  with gleaming armor and beautiful horses, he saw them as a way to protect his family from threats that lay outside the principality.  his father died when he was five, leaving his mother unprotected if he didn’t learn how to fight.  that, more than anything else, solidified his decision.

          at seven he was taken in by a family friend to start walking the path towards knighthood.  he became a page.

          by the time the byzantine empire asked for help he was twenty five years old.  he fought beneath the prince of antioch, bohemond I ( who also happened to be prince of taranto ).  nicky was also part of the embassy bohemond would later send to godfrey of bouillion to help march into constantinople.  through those marches he’d been plagued by dreams he didn’t understand.  other men and women in different places than he.  faces he was certain he’d never seen before.  at one point the dreams are so vivid he’s afraid he’s seeing things.

[illustratus]

Taking of the fortress of Maarat by the Crusaders in 1098

Capture of the fortress of Maarat in the province of Antioch in 1098 by Henri Decaisne

[warsofasoiaf]

Why did the crusaders beat the muslims so often in the earlier crusades? Is it do to having Heavier cavalry?

Like all wars, it was a combination of factors. One of the most important was that of quality military leadership. Bohemond of Taranto and King Richard the Lionheart were both excellent generals capable of dissecting battlefields and seizing strategic objectives quickly and decisively.

Also, while the generals of the Crusades had their own distinct and separate individual goals, all shared the goal of the Crusade’s success. By contrast, the various Muslim powers of the First Crusade’s time were often at each other’s throats, the Fatimids and Seljuks competed vigorously, and the Danishmends were ostensibly allied with the Seljuks but often held back so that they could maximize their own gains, leading to plenty of suboptimal strategic and tactical deployments. Notably, when Saladin united Syria and Egypt into the Ayuubid dynasty, he had far more success than the Fatimids did.

Heavy cavalry was useful in some battles, as was the religious purpose which kept morale up even in the face of serious deprivation. 

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[honey-piggy]

Omg gladly. So it all started when the Byzantine empire lost most of Anatolia so Seljuq turks. First crusade was called by Pope Urban II at the council of clermont in 1095. Four massive Christian armies left Constantinople in August 1096 to recapture the Holy land. There were 30k soldiers including peasants and commoners. My history teacher told me that most of the commoners and peasants went there in search of wealth. They stole gold from people on their way to the Holy land. 1/2

First crusade was led by Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Godfrey of Bouillon, Hugh of Vermandois and Bohemond of Taranto Hugh of Vermandois. It ended in 1099. 2/2

Brb, I’m off to read about the First Crusade so I can impress Ri with my knowledge in future conversations

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.9 (before 1950)

474 – Zeno is crowned as co-emperor of the Byzantine Empire. 1003 – Boleslaus III is restored to authority with armed support from Bolesław I the Brave of Poland. 1098 – A First Crusade army led by Bohemond of Taranto wins a major battle against the Seljuq emir Ridwan of Aleppo during the siege of Antioch. 1539 – The first recorded race is held on Chester Racecourse, known as the Roodee. 1555 – Bishop of Gloucester John Hooper is burned at the stake. 1621 – Gregory XV becomes Pope, the last Pope elected by acclamation. 1654 – The Capture of Fort Rocher takes place during the Anglo-Spanish War. 1775 – American Revolutionary War: The British Parliament declares Massachusetts in rebellion. 1778 – Rhode Island becomes the fourth US state to ratify the Articles of Confederation. 1822 – Haiti attacks the newly established Dominican Republic on the other side of the island of Hispaniola. 1825 – After no candidate receives a majority of electoral votes in the US presidential election of 1824, the United States House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams as sixth President of the United States in a contingent election. 1849 – The new Roman Republic is declared. 1861 – American Civil War: Jefferson Davis is elected the Provisional President of the Confederate States of America by the Provisional Confederate Congress at Montgomery, Alabama 1870 – US president Ulysses S. Grant signs a joint resolution of Congress establishing the U.S. Weather Bureau. 1889 – US president Grover Cleveland signs a bill elevating the United States Department of Agriculture to a Cabinet-level agency. 1893 – Verdi's last opera, Falstaff premieres at La Scala, Milan. 1895 – William G. Morgan creates a game called Mintonette, which soon comes to be referred to as volleyball. 1900 – The Davis Cup competition is established. 1904 – Russo-Japanese War: Battle of Port Arthur concludes. 1907 – The Mud March is the first large procession organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). 1913 – A group of meteors is visible across much of the eastern seaboard of the Americas, leading astronomers to conclude the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth. 1920 – Under the terms of the Svalbard Treaty, international diplomacy recognizes Norwegian sovereignty over Arctic archipelago Svalbard, and designates it as demilitarized. 1922 – Brazil becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty. 1929 – Members of the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng assassinate the labor recruiter Bazin, prompting a crackdown by French colonial authorities. 1932 – Prohibition law is abolished in Finland after a national referendum, where 70% voted for a repeal of the law. 1934 – The Balkan Entente is formed between Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Turkey. 1941 – World War II: Bombing of Genoa: The Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa, Italy, is struck by a bomb which fails to detonate. 1942 – Year-round Daylight saving time (aka War Time) is reinstated in the United States as a wartime measure to help conserve energy resources. 1943 – World War II: Pacific War: Allied authorities declare Guadalcanal secure after Imperial Japan evacuates its remaining forces from the island, ending the Battle of Guadalcanal. 1945 – World War II: Battle of the Atlantic: HMS Venturer sinks U-864 off the coast of Fedje, Norway, in a rare instance of submarine-to-submarine combat. 1945 – World War II: A force of Allied aircraft unsuccessfully attack a German destroyer in Førdefjorden, Norway.

[actualmermaid]

This is extremely fun, because all of these characterizations are based on the massive amounts of research I've been doing and aren't just idle character assassinations. All of them are violent brutes and were probably massive wankers IRL so I'm just portraying them how I see them

Bohemond of Taranto: condescending tyrant

Raymond of Toulouse: we don't see much of him, but he's implied to be a self-important jackwagon

Robert of Normandy: huge loudmouth

Guglielmo Embriaco: drunk capitalist

Peter Bartholomew: fanatic and/or charlatan

The only IRL crusader lord who doesn't get this treatment is Adhemar of le Puy, not because he was awesome, but because we only get a narrow view of him in the story (which I did on purpose)

I'm having a great time assigning super obnoxious personalities to real-life historical figures who appear in my WIP

Raymond Pilet d'Alès, on account of being a roughly 25-year-old nobleman, has "CEO's overly-friendly son who just got back from business school and wants to learn you a few things" energy