MYTHOLOGY MEME || Heroes (4/6) ↬ Princess Melaz
According to the medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis, Melaz was the wise and beautiful daughter of the Turkish emir, Gümüştekin Danishmend Ahmed Gazi. In August 1100, Danishmend took the Crusader Bohémond de Hauteville prisoner after defeating him in battle. Melaz became intrigued by her father's prisoners as she had heard tales of the bravery of the Crusaders and regularly visited Bohémond and the other captives and talked to them. She spoke to them mostly after their religion and became devoted to Christianity.
Two years later, Kilij Arslan (who, for some reason, Orderic identifies as Danishmend's brother) invaded Danishmend's lands. Danishmend responded by raising an army and went out to meet the forces of Kilij Arslan I. Melaz went to the Frankish* prisoners and begged them to help her father so long as they agreed to return after the battle. Bohémond and the other Normans swore that they would, went out to battle, and helped Danishmend defeat Kilij Arslan. Afterwards, they returned to prison as promised. Melaz was so impressed by their loyalty that she freed them from prison and told them to take all of her father's treasures as their rewards, which they did and then fled.
When Danishmend returned and found out about what Melaz had done, he denounced her as a whore and a traitor and informed her that he was going to burn her at the stake for what she had done and then kill all the Franks. Before he could get a chance, Bohémond and the Lombards and Normans rode to her rescue. Melaz ordered that her father be imprisoned. Danishmend cursed his god, Mahomet*, and languished in prison for awhile before finally agreeing to let the Normans depart in peace and that Melaz could go with them. Melaz officially converted to Christianity and married Bohémond's kinsman, Roger de Salerne. Parts of this story are true. Danishmend, Kilij Arslan, Bohémond and Tancrède de Hauteville, and Roger de Salerne were all real people and Bohémond's being held prisoner by Danishmend is true. However, Melaz herself is almost certainly mythical; her story appears in no other chronicle than Orderic's and he credits the tale only to stories that he heard. The Italo-Norman chroniclers Raoul de Caen and Goffredo Malaterra make no mention of her, nor does the later Willelmus Tyrensis. The circumstances surrounding Bohémond's actual release are quite different: he was ransomed in 1103 by Baudouin Ier de Jerusalem because Baudouin preferred Bohémond to rule over Antioch instead of his more aggressive nephew, Tancrède.
F. M. Warren's 1914 essay The Enamoured Moslem Princess in Orderic Vital and the French Epic suggested that the basic plot of this story originated in one of the numerous tales of A Thousand and One Nights which tells of how the Magian (that is, Zoroastrian) lord Bahram captures a Muslim prince named al-As'ad and send his daughter, Bustan to torture him. Instead, Bustan falls in love with al-As'ad and converts to Islam and tells his brother, al-Amad, of his whereabouts. In the end, Bustan marries al-Amad and her father is sentenced to death, but agrees to convert to save his life. Warren also suggests that the element of the story about the captives taking part in a battle may have come from the chanson de geste, La Prinse d'Orange.
Another possibility is that Orderic Vitalis recieved some garbled information about real events. Intially, after hearing of Bohémond's capture, the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnēnos offered Danishmend 260,000 dinars if he would agree to hand Bohémond over to him. (This was not out of concern for Bohémond's welfare: Alexios was extremely upset that the Hautevilles had broken their oath to return Antioch.) When Kilij Arslan I, Danishmend's overlord, heard about this, he demanded that he recieve half of the ransom or he'd invade. After the death of Danishmend in 1104, Kilij Arslan invaded and demanded that Danishmend's son, Gümüshtigin Gazi, give him half of the ransom. Thus, Gümüshtigin Gazi and the Hautevilles allied with each other against the Byzantines and Kilij Arslan.
* Latin Christians at the time were convinced that Muslims were pagans who worshipped Muhammad as a god, along with Apollo. The Byzantines, on the other hand, thought they were a sect of non-Chalcedonian Christians. Obviously, neither view is correct.
