ABSTRACT
Nine hundred years ago at the Council of Clermont in Auvergne Pope Urban II set in motion the crusading expedition which recaptured the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom and in doing so established four new Latin states in the Middle East: in order of their foundation, the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the kingdom of Jerusalem and the county of Tripoli. The crusader conquest of Antioch was merely one reflex of what Robert Bartlett has called the ‘aristocratic diaspora’ of the tenth to thirteenth centuries, in the course of which lords and knights from the heartlands of the former Carolingian empire conquered or settled lands on the periphery of Latin Christendom: Norman knights in England, Scotland and Ireland, Germans in Prussia, and French in Spain, to name only a few. Undoubtedly the Italian Norman Bohemund and his followers were instrumental in the capture of the city of Antioch during the crusade in 1098.
