CRUSADERS, ANTIOCH, Bohemund III, 1163-1201, denier

Description

Bohemond III was a dynamic and adventurous petty ruler as a grownup. The most important thing that happened during his reign was the advent and ascendancy of Saladin, who took away most of the Antiochene lands and put the Crusaders in general in a defensive position thereafter.

Antioch had been a Byzantine city, then the Abbasids took it, then the Byzantines got it back, then the Seljuk Turks captured it, then Bohemond of Taranto, on a crusading holiday, took it, ostensibly on behalf of the Byzantines. His family members who succeeded him behaved typically for the time, scheming, fighting, making promises and breaking them, and so forth. Most of the Antiochene territory was taken by Saladin. The Franks paid tribute to the Mongols after their arrival, but that didn’t stop the Mamluks from destroying their power and taking their land.

For about all of known human history since horses came on the scene people have liked to go marauding, during which they stole things, destroyed things, and killed people. From 1096 to 1271 it became fashionable in Western Europe to go over to the “Holy Land” and mix things up with the locals. That was called the “Crusades” over here on the Euro side. On the local side they were called Farangi, means Franks, means Foreigners. Winning battles is one thing, holding on is another. The Crusaders were eventually kicked out of the Middle East. They then turned their attentions to colonization.

The political arrangements that resulted in the nations of modern Europe began to emerge out of anarchy starting in the 7th century AD or so. Europe, for our purposes stretches from Greenland to somewhere in Russia. Collectors of Europe would likely include Russia. Collectors of Asia, even though about 2/3 of Russia is in Asia, probably not.

By “Modern World Coins” we mean here, generally, the round, flat, shiny metal objects that people have used for money and still do. “Modern,” though, varies by location. There was some other way they were doing their economies, and then they switched over to “modern coins,” then they went toward paper money, now we’re all going toward digital, a future in which kids look at a coin and say “What’s that?” We’ll say: “We used to use those to buy things.” Kids will ask “How?” The main catalog reference is the Standard Catalog of World Coins, to which the KM numbers refer.