ABSTRACT
The Assises d’Antioche is a treatise on the law of the principality composed at some point between the end of the twelfth century and the year 1219. That makes it roughly contemporary with the Norman Tres Ancien Coutumier and with the earliest of the treatises from the kingdom of Jerusalem, the Livre au Roi, which on internal evidence belongs to the years 1198–1205. Antioch itself had been conquered by the armies of the First Crusade in 1098 and, as is well known, it was Bohemond, the son of Robert Guiscard duke of Apulia, who acquired control. The plain of Cilicia was lost in the 1130s, and then at some point in the mid-twelfth century, possibly as early as the late 1130s, the Templars acquired control of a huge swathe of territory to the north of Antioch centred on the castle of Baghras in the Amanus Mountains.
