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I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father’s deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything …
Anna Comnena, The Alexiad.
Byzantium had gained a great deal from the First Crusade. Nicaea had been reclaimed by the empire, the high tide of the Turks’ incursions into Asia Minor seemed to have been survived and the Byzantine navy had once more started to take control of at least the north-east Mediterranean following a massive naval rearmament programme, which produced three fleets of sophisticated warships, capable of delivering the ‘secret’ weapon of Greek Fire both above and below the waves, between 1090 and 1105.
The Crusaders may very well have wondered what they had gained from Byzantine aid. Given that Antioch’s lands were continually threatened by the emperor’s army and that, if the Latin chroniclers are to be believed, he was complicit in the destruction of the Crusading armies of 1101, then the Byzantines were an untrustworthy ally at best.
Alexius was certainly a great soldier, a superior tactician and a skilled politician. Maintaining the balance of power between the Turks and the Crusaders was a key strategic objective if he was to keep a Byzantine presence in Anatolia, a vital source of both taxes for the empire and recruits for the army, and to reclaim his north Syrian possessions. Alexius also used the threat of the Franks in his negotiations with the Turks. Ibn al-Qalanasi wrote that Alexius, in an embassy to Baghdad in 1111, claimed to have so far impeded the Franks but that this impediment would cease if there was no effective Muslim response to the Latin advances. It is notable that a Muslim expedition was organised from Baghdad very shortly after this communication.
Alexius could of course easily salve his conscience with the taking of Edessa and Antioch by the Crusaders in contravention of their oaths to him, and with the acts of the Normans in particular. Their assaults on Byzantium predated the Crusade in the person of Guiscard and Bohemond, and Bohemond and Tancred continued to wound the Empire with Norman Antioch taking Tarsus, Adana and Massissa from the Byzantines. Indeed the assaults only ended with the failure of Bohemond’s 1108 expedition to attempt the defeat of Alexius in Greece, and the great Norman’s death shortly after.
By the 1130s the growing threat of the jihad that had grown from Mosul to Aleppo caused a realignment of alliances, with Raymond of Antioch recognising the Byzantine Emperor as his overlord, rather than the King of Jerusalem. It was a simple matter of survival as Byzantine strength in northern Syria had recovered to such extent that the Emperor John II was even able to begin a strident campaign against the Turks, and also reclaimed Tarsus and Adana from the Armenians. John also received the vassalage of Tripoli and of Edessa, and brought a Byzantine-Crusader army, with forces drawn from Antioch and Edessa, into Syria in the spring of 1138. He would find a very doughty opponent waiting for him on the battlefield.