Byzantine Antioch

It never falls to the Turks. I recall that was betrayed to them in 1085. Since it was such a large city with such impressive walls, I doubt that a Turkish siege would have been successful. The armies of the first crusade pass through it's territory. Could it have eventually become independent and become something like the empire of Trebizond?
 
If the Byzantine position in the Near East hadn't completely crumbled, then it's unlikely the Crusades would have happened at all. The immediate cause for Urban II launching it was a letter for aid from the Emperor Alexius. If the Byzantines had, say, won at Manzikert or held on to their holdings in Edessa and Antioch then I doubt he would have gone to the Latins for help.
 

chronos

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With its triple walls like Constantinople it could have held out and been supplied by sea by the Imperial Roman navy. I didn't know it had been betrayed to the Turks.

However, if the Romans had still called in the Frankish crusaders then Antioch would have been a good jumping off place for even greater gains.
 
Antioch went back in forth between the Arabs and Byzantines (and later the Turks). Besides, 1085 is after Manzikert, which means the Romans would be much more occupied in trying to take back Anatolia (their back yard, basically) than a city in Syria.
 
It never falls to the Turks. I recall that was betrayed to them in 1085. Since it was such a large city with such impressive walls, I doubt that a Turkish siege would have been successful. The armies of the first crusade pass through it's territory. Could it have eventually become independent and become something like the empire of Trebizond?

I doubt it. Trebizond was shielded by a more or less impassible mountain barrier - Antioch stands in the middle of a plain. It's also not a port, so it doesn't have the same potential as Trebizond or Constantinople to withstand siege. Sooner or later it's toast. And really, Trebizond didn't last all that long - mostly because it wasn't in that important an area. Antioch is unfortunately located in that regard as everyone will be after it.
 
My impression was that Antioch was pretty much a shadow of its former self by the 7th century.

Also, it wasn't the Turks who took it from the Byzantines, it was the Armenians.

But besides changing hands several times, it was the silting up of the access to the sea that permanently ruined Antioch as a great city - in the Classical Age it was a great port - by the 11th c it was a decayed inland city with Alexandretta taking on most of its former sea trade, and Aleppo had developed as the big trade city astride the great caravan routes.
 
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