Odo the Good Marquis

Odo (or Eudes) the Good Marquis (fl. 11th century), sometimes called Odobonus, was a Norman or Lombard nobleman who ruled an unknown region of southern Italy. He married Emma, a daughter of Robert Guiscard, and they had at least three sons, Tancred and William, both famous crusaders, and Robert, as well as a daughter who married Richard of Salerno. Odo is known only in connection to his wife and sons.

Name and nickname The only source to give Tancred's father the name Odo is Orderic Vitalis, who, like Ralph of Caen, believes him to be a brother-in-law and not son-in-law of Guiscard. In one passage he writes that, seeing his end coming, "the magnanimous Robert [Guiscard], duke, count, etc., called around him Odo the Good, the marquis, his sister's [husband], and other relatives and nobles". When Orderic later lists the crusaders of 1096, he mentions "Tancred, son of the marquis Odo the Good". Orderic's known erudition, and his contemporaneity with Tancred, make his testimony the best available on the latter's paternity. Only on the parentage of Odo's wife, Emma, does Orderic seem mistaken. Since Tancred and his brother William were both young at the time of the First Crusade, it is unlikely that their mother could have been a daughter of Tancred's namesake, Tancred of Hauteville.

Evelyn Jamison identifies Tancred's father with the margrave Odobonus who witnessed a document issued by Count Roger I of Sicily at Palermo in 1094 and with the Odobonus Marchisus who appears in a lawsuit of 1097, now archived at Agrigento. A third reference, to Othonus, who commanded a division of Count Roger's at Taormina in 1078, may also be to Tancred's father. Jamison suggests that Tancred is so-called simply because he knew Arabic. Marino Sanuto the Elder records that Tancred was Bohemond's "nephew by his sister".

Two sources contradict the former, erroneously making Tancred a cousin and not a nephew of Bohemond, but do not name his father. The Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium of Fulcher of Chartres calls him "Bohemond's cousin" and Jacques de Vitry refers to "Bohemond with his cousin Tancred". Throughout the Gesta Ralph calls Tancred Marchisides, using the Greek suffix -ides, meaning "son of", thus "son of the marquis". Elsewhere he lumps together Tancred and Bohemond as Wiscardides ("sons/descendants of Guiscard"), even though he mistakenly believed Emma to have been a sister and not a daughter of Robert Guiscard. He also gives Tancred a brother named Robert, otherwise unknown: "the Guiscardids, Tancred and his brothers William and Robert".