Tancred, Prince of Galilee

Tancred (1072 - December 5 or 12, 1112) was a leader of the First Crusade who later became regent of the Principality of Antioch and Prince of Galilee.

Biography
Tancred was a son of Emma of Apulia. His maternal grandparents were Robert Guiscard and Guiscard's first wife Alberada of Buonalbergo. Emma was also a sister of Bohemund of Taranto.

In 1096, Tancred joined his maternal uncle Bohemund on the First Crusade, and the two made their way to Constantinople. There, he was pressured to swear an oath to Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, promising to give back any conquered land to the Byzantine Empire. Although the other leaders did not intend to keep their oaths, Tancred refused to swear the oath altogether.

He participated in the siege of Nicaea in 1097, but the city was taken by Alexius' army after secret negotiations with the Seljuk Turks. Because of this Tancred was very distrustful of the Byzantines. Later in 1097 he captured Tarsus and other cities in Cilicia and assisted in the siege of Antioch in 1098.

In 1099, during the assault on Jerusalem, Tancred, along with Gaston IV of Béarn, claimed to be the first Crusader to enter the city on July 15. He and Gaston took hundreds of Muslim prisoners, providing protection to some on the roof of the Temple. However, the following morning he issued a command to the Crusaders to proceed to the Temple and kill the rest of the population that had been assembled there, Muslim and Jewish, both male and female. It may have been that the Western Europeans could not distinguish between the features of the Arab and Jewish populace. When the Kingdom of Jerusalem was established, Tancred became Prince of Galilee.

In 1100 Tancred became regent of Antioch when Bohemund was taken prisoner by the Danishmends. He expanded the territory of the Principality by capturing land from the Byzantines, although over the next decade Alexius attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring him under Byzantine control. In 1104 he also took control of the County of Edessa when Baldwin II was taken captive after the Battle of Harran. After Baldwin's release in 1107 he had to fight Tancred to regain control of the county; Tancred was eventually defeated and returned to Antioch.

In 1108 Tancred refused to honour the Treaty of Devol, in which Bohemund swore an oath of fealty to Alexius and for decades afterwards Antioch remained independent of the Byzantine Empire. In 1110 he brought Krak des Chevaliers under his control, which would later become an important castle in the County of Tripoli. Tancred remained regent in Antioch in the name of Bohemund II until his death in 1112 during a typhoid epidemic. He had married Cecile of France but died childless.

The Gesta Tancredi is a biography of Tancred written in Latin by Ralph of Caen, a Norman who joined the First Crusade and served under Tancred and Bohemund. An English translation was published in 2005 by David S. Bachrach.

Tancred in fiction
Tancred appears as a character in Torquato Tasso's 16th-century poem "Jerusalem Delivered", in which he is portrayed as an epic hero and given a fictional love interest, the pagan warrior-maiden Clorinda. He is also loved by the Princess Erminia of Antioch. Portions of Tasso's verses were set by Claudio Monteverdi in his 1624 dramatic work Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Rossini based his opera Tancredi on Voltaire's 1759 play Tancrède. He also appears in one of the scenes in Imre Madách's The Tragedy of Man.