ABSTRACT
John II Comnenus and Crusader Antioch David Alan Parnell
Saint Louis University
John II Comnenus is an enigmatic gure. Although he was a powerful monarch and wielded important inuence in the Near East, his reign has oen been considered a temporary interlude between the more widely-studied reigns of Alexius I and Manuel I. John has been alternately portrayed as a military warlord unable to control his temper and a cynic who could not contain his overwhelming ambitions, cheerfully breaking treaties in order to achieve them. For example, Ralph-Johannes Lilie has argued that John was willing to break a previous treaty in order to gain control of Antioch.1 Likewise, Paul Magdalino has accused John of having a temper, insisting that the emperor entered Syria in 1142 motivated by “a strong desire for revenge.”2 More recently Jonathan Harris has argued the opposite, claiming that John was only interested in recognition of his imperial status and not the extent of his empire’s territory.3 ese diverse assessments do not easily square with the evidence provided by contemporaries. John was a soldier-emperor, more comfortable in camp than in Constantinople, and although he harbored ambitions to increase the territorial extent of his empire, it seems that he was careful to strive toward those ambitions only in a way he thought reasonable and in keeping with his empire’s best interests.4 Nowhere is this more apparent than in his dealings with the crusader Principality of Antioch.
