Bohemond's Crusade against Byzantium

1107

Bohemond of Taranto, the Norman prince of Antioch, landed an army on the Illyrian coast and laid siege to Dyrrachium in open war against Emperor Alexios I. Starved out after a year, he signed the humiliating Treaty of Devol and went home to die unnoticed in Apulia. The failed campaign exposed the fundamental tension between the Crusader states and Byzantium, whose emperor had never intended the First Crusade to produce independent Frankish principalities.