Laodikeia (Laodicea) in Syria (mod. Al-Ladhiqiyah or Lat-takia, Syria) was a city and harbor that belonged to the Frankish principality of Antioch for most of the twelfth century and part of the thirteenth.
Laodikeia was conquered from Byzantium by the Arabs around 640. The Byzantine emperor Nikephoras II Phokas retook the city in 968, and for the next century it remained on the frontier between Byzantium and Islam.
During the First Crusade (1096-1099) the city came under the rule of a confusing succession of different individuals, about whom the sources are contradictory. First conquered from the Turks by Guiynemer, a semi-piratical figure from Boulogne, Laodikeia was then occupied by Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy. After the capture of Antioch (1098) the city came into the hands of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who handed it over to the Byzantines when he left to continue the crusade to Jerusalem. Bohe-mund I of Antioch, who remained in Syria in 1099 after the crusade moved on, besieged the city that summer with the aid of Daibert, archbishop of Pisa, and the fleet he had brought with him. However, this action was interrupted by the return of Raymond, Robert of Normandy, and Robert II of Flanders from the conquest of Jerusalem, who all protested against this attack on fellow Christians and allies.
Tancred, regent of Antioch, captured the city after a siege of a year and a half in 1103. Following the disastrous defeat of the Franks by the Turks at the battle of Harran (7 May 1104), however, the Byzantines reoccupied Laodikeia. Tancred, again regent in 1108, seized the city while Emperor Alexios I Komnenos was fighting Bohemund I in the Balkans.
Along with Jabala, Laodikeia was part of the dowry given to Alice of Jerusalem on her marriage to Bohemund II of Antioch, and it was to these cities that she retired after her attempted coup in Antioch in 1130 failed. Sacked in 1136 by the Turks of Aleppo and damaged in an earthquake in 1170, Laodikeia fell to Saladin’s army in 1188, causing the writer ‘Imad-al-Dln to mourn the destruction of the beautiful city. Muslim control of the city separated the Frankish states of Antioch and Tripoli, though both were under the rule of the same prince. Bohemund VI of Antioch’s alliance with the Mongols in 1260 led to the return of Laodikeia to Frankish control. When it was taken by Sultan Qalawun in 1287, after its walls were damaged by an earthquake, the city was the last remnant of the principality to be conquered by the Mamluks.
-Christopher MacEvitt
Bibliography
Cahen, Claude, La Syrie du Nord a I’epoque des croisades et la principaute franque d’Antioche (Paris: Geuthner, 1940).
France, John, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
World History
