Denier - Raymond of Poitiers Large bust

Raymond of Poitiers took Antioch not by conquest but by marriage — arriving from Aquitaine in 1136 to wed the twelve-year-old heiress Constance, outmaneuvering a Byzantine diplomatic push for the city. His reign ended at the Field of Artah in 1149, where Nur ad-Din's forces killed him and, by some accounts, sent his head to the caliph in Baghdad. The coinage produced across those thirteen years reflects a crusader state still asserting Latin identity on its own terms, prior to the increasingly Byzantinized types that would follow under later Antiochene rulers.