page_title: Leo Sgouros
section_title: Defeat and death
hierarchical_section_title: Leo Sgouros / Biography / Defeat and death
caption_attribution_description: Castle of Acrocorinth
context_page_description: Leo Sgouros, Latinized as Leo Sgurus, was a Greek independent lord in the northeastern Peloponnese in the early 13th century. The scion of the magnate Sgouros family, he succeeded his father as hereditary lord in the region of Nauplia. Taking advantage of the disruption caused by the Fourth Crusade, he made himself independent, one of several local rulers that appeared throughout the Byzantine Empire during the final years of the Angeloi dynasty. He expanded his domain into Corinthia and Central Greece, eventually marrying the daughter of former Byzantine emperor Alexios III Angelos. His conquests, however, were short-lived, as the Crusaders forced him back into the Peloponnese. Blockaded in his stronghold on the Acrocorinth, he committed suicide in 1208.
context_section_description: In the autumn of 1204, following their capture of Constantinople, the Crusaders under Boniface of Montferrat marched into Thessaly and headed south. Sgouros withdrew before the superior Crusader army. Initially he planned to make a stand in the pass of the Thermopylae, but he eventually retired to the Peloponnese, establishing a defence on the Isthmus of Corinth. The army of Boniface took Boeotia and Attica without resistance, and relieved the blockade of Athens, where Choniates surrendered the city to him. Boniface's first assault on Sgouros's defenses in the Isthmus was repulsed, but the second broke through, and by spring 1205 he controlled the countryside of the northeastern Peloponnese, while the fortified cities held out against him.
  Sgouros himself withdrew and was blockaded in his stronghold, the well-fortified citadel of the Acrocorinth, in a siege that was to last five years. Sgouros's resistance was energetic, with sorties that harassed the besiegers. To tighten their siege, the Franks built two forts, one on the hill of Pendeskouphi and one on the eastern approaches. According to legend, Sgouros eventually despaired, and in 1208 he jumped off the high cliffs on his horse. Resistance was continued by a certain Theodore, but in the end, the citadel fell in 1210, removing one of the last major centers of resistance against the establishment of the Frankish Principality of Achaea.
caption: The entrance fortifications of the Acrocorinth citadel.
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