Prince of Antioch (1111/1126–1130), son of the crusader founder Bohemond I, who came from Italy to rule the principality and was killed young, leaving an infant heiress.
Bohemond II was prince of Antioch, the son of the great crusader leader Bohemond I who had founded the principality on the First Crusade. Born in southern Italy, he inherited the title as an infant in 1111, while a succession of regents governed Antioch on his behalf, and he came east to take personal control only in 1126.
His brief personal rule, sealed by marriage to Alice, a daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, was cut short in 1130, when he was killed in a battle against the Danishmend Turks in the north. He left only an infant daughter, Constance, as heiress, plunging Antioch into a long and troubled minority.
Bohemond was born in 1108 in Apulia, in the Norman lands of southern Italy, the son of Bohemond I of Antioch and Constance, a daughter of King Philip I of France. His father died in 1111, when the boy was only three, leaving him the distant principality of Antioch under the regency of his cousin Tancred and then of others, while Bohemond himself was raised in Italy.
For fifteen years Antioch was governed by regents — Tancred, Roger of Salerno, and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem — until in 1126 the young prince finally sailed east to claim his inheritance in person.
Bohemond II lived too briefly, and left too thin a record, for much of his character to be known; he is seen mostly as the awaited heir of a famous father. The sources present him as a promising young prince — brave, well-born, and welcomed in the East as the legitimate blood of the great Bohemond — whose arrival was expected to end the uncertainties of the long regency.
What the record allows is a picture of headstrong courage that proved his undoing. Barely established in his principality, he threw himself into the dangerous frontier warfare of the north, and it was there, leading his men against the Turks, that he was killed at only twenty-two. He appears as the gallant but short-lived scion of the house of Hauteville, whose early death, rather than any achievement, shaped the history of Antioch after him.
Taking up personal rule in 1126, Bohemond II married Alice, a daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, binding Antioch more closely to the senior crusader kingdom. He set about defending and asserting his principality amid the constant pressure of its Muslim and Armenian neighbours and the rival ambitions of the county of Edessa.
In February 1130, campaigning in the mountainous north against the Danishmend Turks and their Cilician Armenian allies, Bohemond fell into an ambush and was killed. So striking was the death of the young Frankish prince that his embalmed head was reportedly sent as a trophy to the caliph in Baghdad.
Bohemond II's death left Antioch with no male heir — only his infant daughter Constance, born of his marriage to Alice. His widow Alice tried to seize power for herself, and the resulting struggle drew in King Baldwin II and, later, King Fulk of Jerusalem as overseers of the principality. Constance's eventual marriages would determine the rule of Antioch for the next generation.
Bohemond II is remembered as the last male ruler of Antioch in the direct male line of its crusader founder, whose early death opened a long period of female inheritance, regency, and disputed marriages. Through his daughter Constance and her descendants the principality would pass to new hands, but the vigorous Hauteville line that Bohemond I had planted in the East effectively ended with his son's death in a northern ambush.