Bohemund VI of Antioch-Tripoli (d. 1275)

Prince of Antioch and count of Tripoli (1252-1275).

The son of Bohemund V of Antioch-Tripoli and Lucienne of Segni, Bohemund VI succeeded to both principalities on the death of his father (1252), when, although still a minor, he seized power from his mother with the help of the crusader King Louis IX of France. It was Louis who arranged Bohemund’s marriage to Sibyl, daughter of King Het‘um I of Cilicia, ending years of hostilities between the two neighboring states. With Het‘um, Bohemund allied with the Mongols and received back the port of Laodikeia (mod. Al-Ladhiqlyah, Syria), which had been lost since 1188. However, the Mongols required Bohemund to admit the Greek patriarch Euthymios into the city of Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey), earning the prince a papal excommunication.

Following the Mongol defeat by the Mamluks at ‘Ayn Jalut in September 1260, Bohemund’s lands were again threatened. The Mamluks invaded the county of Tripoli in 1266, capturing Arqah and dividing the county in two. Ten years later, the Mamluk sultan Baybars I captured Antioch, massacring its inhabitants (1268); although Bohemund survived in Tripoli, most of the principality of Antioch was lost. In 1270 the mighty Hospitaller castle Krak des Chevaliers fell to Baybars, but Bohemund managed to gain a ten-year truce with the sultan. Bohemund VI died in 1275, passing his much-reduced lands to his son Bohemund VII.

-Christopher MacEvitt

Bibliography

Cahen, Claude, La Syrie du nord a I’epoque des croisades et la principaute franque d’Antioche (Paris: Geuthner, 1940).

Runciman, Steven, History of the Crusades, 3 vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Sourdel, Dominique, “Bohemond et les chretiens a Damas sous l’occupation mongole,” in Dei gesta per Francos, ed. Michel Balard, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 295-299.