Bohemond III
Bohemond III ruled Antioch for thirty-eight years, was captured in his first battle and outlived Saladin, and kept the principality alive by being, successively, Byzantium's client, Saladin's neighbour and Armenia's prisoner. He was the son of Raymond of Poitiers, killed by Nur ad-Din in 1149, and of Constance, the heiress; he took the government from his mother in 1163, at nineteen, with the support of the Byzantine emperor Manuel. In 1164 he led the army of Antioch and Tripoli to disaster at Harim, where Nur ad-Din took him prisoner along with the count of Tripoli. Manuel paid his ransom, which fixed the principality as a Byzantine dependency until the empire's collapse at Myriokephalon in 1176 freed him and left him exposed. His answer was a series of marriages and repudiations that got him excommunicated twice, and a war of nerves with Saladin that he mostly won: in 1188, after the kingdom of Jerusalem had been destroyed at Hattin, Saladin took every town of the principality except Antioch itself and the fortress of Marqab. Then he made a truce, because Frederick Barbarossa's crusade was coming down through Anatolia and he needed his army elsewhere. Antioch survived by being the second target. The last decade was spent on the other frontier: Leo of Armenia, once his vassal, lured him to a meeting at Baghras in 1193 and imprisoned him until he ceded the castle and agreed to marry his heir Raymond to Leo's niece, which produced a succession war between his grandson and his younger son that outlasted him by fifteen years. He died in 1201. The chronicler William of Tyre, who knew him, called him a man of great good sense spoiled by the company he kept; Antioch stayed Frankish for another sixty-seven years, until Baybars.
- Lived: 1144 CE – 1201 CE
- Nationality: Antiochene
- Roles: prince, monarch, head_of_state
