Antioch on the Orontes: a great city of the Roman east and seat of a patriarch, fought over by Persians, Arabs and Byzantines, taken by the First Crusade in 1098 as the capital of a Norman principality, and destroyed by Baybars in 1268.
Antioch stands on the Orontes where the river passes between the ridge of Mount Silpius and the plain of the Amuq, on the road from Anatolia through the Syrian Gates to Aleppo. The position made it a prize for a thousand years: it fell to a Persian king in 540, to the Arabs in the 630s, to a Byzantine commander in 969, to the Seljuks in 1084 and to the First Crusade in 1098, and the Mamluk sultan Baybars destroyed it in 1268.
Its medieval story is one of a shrinking population inside enormous walls, a circuit over Mount Silpius so long that in both 969 and 1098 the city fell to attackers who got over a thinly held stretch of it.
Founded by Seleucus I in about 300 BC, Antioch became the capital of Roman Syria and, by most estimates, the third city of the empire. The Acts of the Apostles records that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians there, and its bishop ranked among the five patriarchs of the early Church.
The sixth century broke it. An earthquake in 526 killed a very large number of people (the chronicler John Malalas gives 250,000, usually treated as an exaggeration), and in 540 the Sasanian king Khosrow I stormed and burned the city and deported its people to a new town near Ctesiphon. Justinian I rebuilt the walls, according to Procopius on a shorter line, but Antioch never regained its ancient size.
Persian armies held Antioch again for most of the years between 611 and 628, and within a decade the Arabs arrived: after Abu Ubayda defeated the Byzantines at the Iron Bridge over the Orontes in 637, the city surrendered on terms. Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs it was a frontier town facing the Taurus passes, still largely Christian, while the Melkite and Syriac Orthodox patriarchs who claimed its see often lived elsewhere.
In the 940s the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla made Aleppo the base of his wars against the Byzantine Empire, with Antioch under his rule, and the conquest of Cilicia by Nikephoros II in 964–965 opened the road to the city.
Nikephoros blockaded Antioch from a fort at Baghras and forbade an assault, wanting a working provincial capital rather than a ruin. On the night of 28 October 969 Michael Bourtzes disobeyed him, seized two towers with about three hundred men and held them for three days until the army arrived. After Nikephoros was murdered in December, with Bourtzes among the conspirators, John I Tzimiskes made Bourtzes the first doux of Antioch.
For 115 years the duchy anchored the empire's eastern frontier, its dukes commanding the small themes of Cilicia and northern Syria and treating Aleppo as a tributary. Melkite Christians from Fatimid Egypt settled in the city, among them the chronicler Yahya of Antioch. After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 the Armenian general Philaretos Brachamios held Antioch as a nearly independent lord, until Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, the Seljuk ruler of Rum, took it by surprise in December 1084.
From 1086 Antioch was held by Yaghi-Siyan, a Turkish governor for the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I, who ruled it almost independently after 1092. The First Crusade arrived on 21 October 1097, and the siege dragged through a winter of famine. The city fell by treachery: Bohemond of Taranto won over Firuz, a tower commander, and on the night of 2–3 June 1098 the crusaders climbed in by his tower and massacred the Muslim inhabitants, though the citadel held out.
Within days Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul, arrived and besieged the besiegers. Stephen-Henry, Count of Blois, who had deserted on 2 June, persuaded Alexios I Komnenos to turn his relief army back. The starving crusaders were rallied by the discovery in the cathedral of St Peter of a spearhead that the visionary Peter Bartholomew said had pierced Christ's side, and on 28 June they marched out and routed Kerbogha's divided army. Bohemond then claimed the city: the papal legate Adhemar of Le Puy died there on 1 August, Raymond IV of Toulouse could not dislodge Bohemond, and the oath to restore Antioch to Alexios was never kept.
Bohemond's principality was the most Norman of the crusader states. While he was a prisoner of the Danishmend Turks in 1100–1103, and after he left for Italy, his nephew Tancred governed. Defeated at Dyrrachium, Bohemond accepted the Treaty of Devol in 1108 as the emperor's vassal, but Tancred ignored it. A Latin patriarch had replaced the Greek one in 1100, and the Byzantine claim to the city shaped imperial policy for the rest of the century.
After Roger of Salerno was killed at the Field of Blood in 1119, Baldwin II of Jerusalem governed as regent. The heiress Constance's first husband, Raymond of Poitou, did homage to John II Komnenos before the walls in 1137 and was killed by Nur ad-Din at Inab in 1149; her second, Reynald of Châtillon, raided Byzantine Cyprus and had to walk beside the emperor's horse when Manuel I Komnenos rode into Antioch in state at Easter 1159. The city stayed Latin after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, but a long succession war after 1201 between Bohemond IV of Tripoli and the Armenian-backed Raymond-Roupen left it weak, and in 1260 Bohemond VI submitted to the Mongols.