Content area
Abstract
After exploring and analysing Robert Guiscard's invasion of the empire in the early 1080's, Bohemond's and Tancred's involvement in and around the First Crusade, and Bohemond's anti-Byzantine propaganda campaign and invasion of 1106-1108, this thesis will consider the short and long-term consequences of these assaults. It will be argued that, taken as a whole, these assaults, and the Byzantine reaction to them, are revealed to be quite significant, that in considering carefully the different elements of the interaction of the de Hautevilles with the Byzantines, one can often find the genesis, or at least the early nurturing and crystallizing of important attitudes, precedents, and power relationships which persisted and developed for centuries. Special attention will be given to such implications for subsequent Byzantine-Western relations, for the commercial ascendancy of Venice, for the solidifying of the Turkish position in Anatolia, for subsequent ecclesiastical relations between East and West, and for the reliability of certain important original sources for the period. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
