Siege of Antioch
The Siege of Antioch took place during the First Crusade in 1097 and 1098. The first siege, by the crusaders against the Muslim-held city, lasted from 21 October 1097 to 2 June 1098. Antioch lay in a strategic location on the crusaders' route to Palestine. Supplies, reinforcements and retreat could all be controlled by the city. Anticipating that it would be attacked, the Muslim governor of the city, Yaghi-Siyan, began stockpilling food and sending requests for help. The Byzantine walls surrounding the city presented a formidable obstacle to its capture, but the leaders of the crusade felt compelled to besiege Antioch anyway.
The crusaders arrived outside the city on 21 October and began the siege. The garrison sortied unsuccessfully on 29 December. After stripping the surrounding area of food, the crusaders were forced to look farther afield for supplies, opening themselves to ambush and while searching for food on 31 December, a force of 20,000 crusaders encountered a relief force led by Duqaq of Damascus heading to Antioch and defeated the army. However, supplies dwindled and in early 1098 one in seven of the crusaders was dying from starvation and people began deserting in January.
Siege of Antioch (1268)
The Siege of Antioch occurred in 1268 when the Mamelukes under Baibars finally succeeded in capturing the city of Antioch. Prior to the siege, the Crusader Principality was oblivious to the loss of the city as demonstrated when Baibars sent negotiators to the leader of the former Crusader state and mocking his use of "Prince" in the title Prince of Antioch.
Prelude to the Siege
In 1260 Baibars, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, began to threaten the Principality of Antioch, a Crusader state, which (as a vassal of the Armenians) had supported the Mongols, the traditional enemies of the Turks. In 1265, Baibars took Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf and massacred the inhabitants. A year later, Baibars conquered Galilee and devastated Cilician Armenia.
As Steven Runciman relates in his last book about the Crusades, time ago before the siege of Antioch (1268), prince Bohemond IV of Antioch had settled his court in the city of Tripoli, capital of his other state, the County of Tripoli. In 1268, the Antiochene knights and garrison were under the command of Simon Mansel, Constable of Antioch, whose wife was an Armenian Lady who was relative to Sybilla of Armenia, wife of prince Bohemond VI.
Battle of Alexandretta
The Battle of Alexandretta was the first clash between the forces of the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate in Syria. It was fought in early 971 near Alexandretta, while the main Fatimid army was besieging Antioch, which the Byzantines had captured two years previously. The Byzantines, led by one of Emperor John I Tzimiskes' household eunuchs, lured a 4,000-strong Fatimid detachment to attack their empty encampment and then attacked them from all sides, destroying the Fatimid force. The defeat at Alexandretta, coupled with the Qarmatian invasion of southern Syria, forced the Fatimids to lift the siege and secured Byzantine control of Antioch and northern Syria.
Background
On 28 October 969, Antioch fell to the Byzantine commander Michael Bourtzes. The fall of the great metropolis of northern Syria was soon followed by a treaty between the Byzantines and the Hamdanid Emirate of Aleppo, which made Aleppo a tributary vassal and handed over to the Byzantine Empire the entirety of the former Abbasid frontier zones (thughur) in Cilicia and Upper Mesopotamia, as well as the coastal strip of Syria between the Mediterranean Sea and the Orontes River until the environs of Tripoli, Arqa, and Shayzar. Byzantine control of this area was initially only theoretical, and the murder of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas in December 969 threatened to nullify Byzantine gains in the region.
Siege of Antioch (disambiguation)
Siege of Antioch may refer to:
Antioch
Antioch on the Orontes (/ˈæntiˌɒk/; also Syrian Antioch) was an ancient Greek - Roman city on the eastern side of the Orontes River. Its ruins lie near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey, and lends the modern city its name.
Antioch was founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals. The city's geographical, military, and economic location benefited its occupants, particularly such features as the spice trade, the Silk Road, and the Persian Royal Road. It eventually rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the Near East. It was also the main center of Hellenistic Judaism at the end of the Second Temple period. Most of the urban development of Antioch was done during the Roman empire, when the city was one of the most important in the eastern Mediterranean area of Rome's dominions.
Antioch was called "the cradle of Christianity" as a result of its longevity and the pivotal role that it played in the emergence of both Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity. The Christian New Testament asserts that the name Christian first emerged in Antioch. It was one of the four cities of the Syrian tetrapolis, and its residents were known as Antiochenes. The city was once a great metropolis of half a million people during Augustan times, but it declined to insignificance during the Middle Ages because of warfare, repeated earthquakes, and a change in trade routes, which no longer passed through Antioch from the far east, following the Mongol conquests.
Antioch station (Illinois)
Antioch is a station on Metra's North Central Service in Antioch, Illinois. The station is 55.7 miles (89.6 km) away from Union Station, the southern terminus of the line. In Metra's zone-based fare system, Antioch is in zone K.
Antioch is the northern terminus of the North Central Service.
Bus connections
Western Kenosha County Transit - Route 2
References
External links
