Crusaders Take Antioch After an Eight-Month Siege
Starvation, plague, and a smuggled entry finally break one of Syria's most fortified cities
Quick facts
- Location
- Antioch, Syria
- Siege duration
- October 1097 to June 1098 (about 8 months)
- Key figure
- Bohemund of Taranto, who kept the city for himself
- Byzantine relations
- Bohemund's refusal to return the city broke the crusaders' oath to Alexios I
What happened
Antioch, a heavily fortified city and one of Christianity's five patriarchal sees, resisted the crusader army for eight months starting in October 1097. The besiegers themselves suffered plague, famine, and desertions, and were in turn besieged by a relieving Muslim army from Mosul once they finally broke in. The city fell on 3 June 1098 after the Norman leader Bohemund of Taranto arranged for a sympathetic guard to open a tower gate at night. Bohemund then refused to hand the city back to Byzantine emperor Alexios I as the crusaders had earlier sworn, keeping it for himself instead and souring relations between the crusade and Constantinople for the rest of the campaign. A Christian account collected at Fordham University describes the desperate suffering inside the crusader camp during the siege alongside the eventual, hard-won breakthrough.
Why it matters
Antioch became the crusaders' first independent principality and the model for the Crusader States that followed: captured by force, held by a western noble rather than returned to Byzantium, and governed as an independent Latin lordship rather than a reconquered Byzantine province.
How we know
Two eyewitness Latin accounts survive: the anonymous Gesta Francorum, written by a participant in Bohemund's own contingent, and the chronicle of Raymond d'Aguiliers, chaplain to Raymond of Toulouse, both collected and translated in Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
Sources
- Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University (Gesta Francorum and Raymond d'Aguiliers). The Siege and Capture of Antioch: Collected Accounts · Primary source (author-declared)sourcebooks.fordham.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. First Crusade · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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