At Christmas 1099, Bohemond, Prince of Antioch, completed the pilgrimage upon which he had set out four years earlier by praying in the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. The city had been captured by the First Crusaders nine months earlier while Bohemond was still securing control over his new territories in northern Syria. Up to the time of the capture of Antioch he had been one of the main leaders of the crusade. He was by descent a Norman, his grandfather Tancred of Hauteville having a quiver-full of sons who sought their fortunes outside the duchy. Bohemond's father, Robert Guiscard, had made himself master of southern Italy in a series of campaigns from the early 1050s into the 1070s. In 1081, Guiscard had even invaded the Byzantine territory of what is now Albania and northern Greece and defeated its emperor in battle. Bohemond (his unusual name stemming from a legendary giant) continued his father's policies of expansion at the expense of the Christian Greeks both before and after the First Crusade, but it was that expedition against the Muslims that gave him opportunity to seize one of the greatest cities of the Levant and create his principality.

He was not the only significant Norman to play a part in the dramatic events which followed upon Pope Urban II's sermon at Clermont in November 1095. Robert, duke of Normandy (the eldest surviving son ofWilliam the Conqueror) also proved himself a fine soldier in the holy war. It was claimed that he had been offered the throne of Jerusalem itself following the city's capture, but that he had declined the offer. Arnulf de Chocques, the Patriarch responsible for restoring the structure of the Church in a region long under Muslim control, was formerly a ducal chaplain in Normandy. Several contemporary Latin chronicles stressed the importance of the Norman contribution to the great adventure, the pilgrimage in arms, which established Christian rule over the Holy Land for the first time since its conquest by the armies of Islam some five centuries earlier. The popular, vernacular literature represented by twelfth-century chansons de geste (songs of great deeds) fêted Duke Robert's heroism for generations afterwards.