The Crusades and the Near East
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The great change in Muslim armies came with the Mamluk regime which seized power in Egypt in 1250. The Turkish soldiers took over the state. They formed a standing army which was a kind of militarised republic drawn generation by generation from steppe Turks, whose chief officers chose a sultan from their own ranks. This remarkable army crushed the crusaders and repelled the Mongol attempt to conquer the Middle East.16
The Seljuk Empire at its greatest extended from Syria in the west across Iraq and Iran into what is now Pakistan, and from the Caucusus to the frontier with Egypt. But it dissolved into sustained civil war after the death of Malik Shah (1072–92). The consequent chaos provided the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I (1081–1118) with the opportunity to intervene with a view to regaining the lands of Anatolia lost to the Turks since 1071. His appeal for mercenaries to assist in this process reached Pope Urban II (1088–99) at the Council of Piacenza in March 1095. This triggered Urban’s thinking which led to the summoning of the First Crusade at Clermont in November of the same year.
The first crusaders entered a very divided world. The dominant power in Turkish Anatolia was the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, but they were challenged by Danishmends, Menguchekids and Saltukids to the east and defied by the Emirate of Smyrna to the west. Berkyaruk made good his claim to the Sultanate at Baghdad, but he was deeply preoccupied by asserting his power in the eastward dominions. Syria was disputed between his young cousins, Duqaq of Damascus and Ridwan of Aleppo, and this enabled the rulers of cities like Antioch and Homs to play one off against another. Jerusalem was held by the Artukids and they were effectively independent. Fatimid Egypt to the south saw these divisions as an opportunity to regain her lost power in Syria. It was undoubtedly this high degree of fragmentation that underlay the success of the First Crusade, but it should be noted that many of these ‘fragments’ were actually rich and powerful and could raise big armies.
On 1 July 1097 a Turkish army ambushed the vanguard of the army of the First Crusade. It is hardly surprising that a priest, Fulcher of Chartres, found this a novel but harrowing experience:
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Altogether they numbered 360,000 fighters, all on horses and armed
with bows, as was their custom. We, on the other hand, had both footsoldiers and knights . . . The Turks crept up, howling loudly and
shooting a shower of arrows. Stunned, and almost dead, and with many wounded, we immediately fled. And it was no wonder, for such warfare was new to us all.17
What is more surprising is that a knight in the contingent of Bohemond of Otranto was equally surprised:
Our men wondered exceedingly whence had arisen so great a multitude
of Turks, Arabs, Saracens and others, for almost all the mountains and hills and valleys and all the level places, within and without, were on all sides covered with that excommunicate race.18
This is strange, because the anonymous knight was from southern Italy, whose ruler, Robert Guiscard, had tried to conquer Byzantium through the Balkans in the years 1081–5. His son, Bohemond, one of the leaders of the ambushed vanguard, had served in Robert’s army and had encountered Turks fighting for the Emperor. Moreover, Anna Comnena says that her father had told the leaders what to expect from the Turks.19 But armies learn by experience, and most of the knights in the vanguard would have been totally surprised by the Turkish tactics.
As the enemy army approached, the leaders of the vanguard ordered the infantry to set camp while the cavalry advanced to meet them. But the Turks divided and surged around the western cavalry, threatening to surround them. As a result, the knights bolted, only to be rallied by Bohemond and Robert, Duke of Normandy. This was generalship of a very high order by medieval standards, and it resulted in a chaotic situation with the knights driven back on the camp in a confused mass of men, animals and tents. This compacted mass drew the Turks into a close-quarter scrum which suited the heavy weaponry of the westerners, and eventually the main body of their army came up and drove off the enemy. The First Crusade was lucky to survive at Dorylaeum, but the crusaders recognised the need for discipline and close order as a response to the encircling tactics of the Turks. Early in 1098 the Franks, then besieging Antioch, sent a foraging expedition into Syria, and ran into a relief army despatched to Antioch by Duqaq of Damascus. Their battle formation took account of the tactics of the Turks because while the Count of Flanders went forward with the vanguard, Bohemond held back in a rearguard:
For the Turks have this custom in fighting: even though they are fewer in number, they always strive to encircle their enemy. This they
attempted to do in this battle also, but by the foresight of Bohemund the wiles of the enemy were prevented.20
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By the end of the crusade the westerners had adopted a new tactical device –
throwing their infantry forward to keep horse-archers out of range of the horses.
Thus a whole battery of tactical devices, essentially dependent upon tight discipline and close order, were devised to counter Turkish tactics. But each new crusading army came fresh to the task of learning new methods of fighting, and all found it difficult to accept the discipline demanded. The ‘Crusade of 1101’
went down to total disaster in Anatolia.21 On the Second Crusade the German army’s discipline seems to have collapsed, leading to its destruction. The French army fought its way through Anatolia in column headed by a strong vanguard, but on Mount Cadmus this powerful force went off on its own to camp with disastrous results because the Turks broke into the column: ‘The Turks thrust and slashed, and the defenceless crowds fled or fell like sheep . . . exposed the king and his companions to death.’22
Even on St Louis’ crusade, when the French King was the undisputed commander, subordinates took matters into their own hands. At the highest level we have already noted the rashness of Robert of Artois, but lower down the scale Joinville, the king’s biographer, reports that at the Battle of Mansourah in February 1250: ‘In the meantime, I and my knights had decided to go and attack some Turks who were loading their baggage in their camp on our left; so we fell upon them.’23 In the event he and his men had to be rescued when they were ambushed. Western armies with their weak chains of command were always prone to this kind of indiscipline, which meant that although leaders knew that close formation and tight control were essential, these were very difficult to implement.
Siege warfare, on the other hand, was something with which westerners were familiar. The cities of the east, with their Roman fortifications, were bigger and better fortified than anything they had encountered in Europe, but the siege of Nicaea, with its elaborate deployment of catapults, siege towers, cats and mining, demonstrated western mastery of technique as well as sheer determination.
Antioch was so great a city that assault proved impossible and a close blockade was implemented, and this was extended with great skill so that eventually the city fell by betrayal. At Jerusalem the double wall to the north of the city was breached by a ram, and a great siege-tower pushed in to carry the main curtain. But it was a skilful switch of the schwerpunkt from the north-west to the north-east corner which made life difficult for the defenders, who were also having to divide their forces to face the Count of Toulouse’s attack on Zion Gate to the south.24 This skill in siege warfare then enabled the western settlers to seize the cities of the coast in alliance with the Italian city-states who were seeking trading bases in the Levant. The culmination of this process was the long siege of Tyre which, having resisted successfully in 1112, fell in 1124.25 After the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1187 the Third Crusade focused its efforts on a great siege of Acre from 1189 to 1191, whose successful conclusion provided a capital for the new kingdom which would last until 1291. During the Fifth Crusade the attack on Damietta occupied the army from May 1218 to November 1219. The Muslims proved just as adept at siege warfare. The Mamluks captured mighty Crac
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Chevaliers in a siege which lasted from 3 March to 8 April 1271, and Marqab, besieged on 17 April 1285, surrendered on 24 May. The final assault on Acre began on 6 April 1291 and ended with a terrible sack on 18 May though the Templar fortress held out until 28 May 1291. It is said that on this occasion the Mamluks deployed ninety machines in their assault on the city. Siege warfare involved the use of relatively sophisticated machinery, but neither side enjoyed any technological advantage.26 In the end storming a fortification was enormously costly in lives lost, and once an army broke in with its blood up a massacre was pretty well inevitable. This is what happened at Jerusalem in 1099 and Acre in 1291. Such horrors explain why most sieges ended with negotiated surrenders from which both attacker and defender profited.27
The First Crusade established Latin Christian bridgeheads in Syria and Palestine which the settlers in these areas then had to be make into viable entities. They were never united and, as we shall see, often pursued radically different and even contradictory policies. But one simple condition underwrote their existence. This was western naval supremacy. It is remarkable that there is no naval history of the crusades,28 for the First Crusade received very substantial naval assistance and could hardly have succeeded without it.29 Subsequently the capture of the cities of the Palestinian littoral was heavily dependent upon the fleets of the Italian city-states who quickly established a maritime supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean which would end only with the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. How and why this came about has never been fully explored, though J.H. Pryor has made some interesting suggestions.30 Previous to the First Crusade, Egypt had had a powerful fleet, but this was so eclipsed that when Saladin tried to revive it in the 1180s he simply could not find enough sailors to sustain the effort.31 The Fifth Crusade landed in Egypt in 1218 and continued until 1221. In that time there was never any attempt to interfere with its sea-borne communications. This is an astonishing fact and underlines the extent to which crusading depended upon command of the sea for its very being.
The states of the Latin east enjoyed very different possibilities for expansion and therefore were forced to consider different strategies.32 Antioch held the Jabal Ansariyah. Before them was the Orontes Valley and its eastern bank, the much lower Belus Massif and beyond that a great plain in the north of which stood Aleppo, only 100 kilometres from Antioch along a good Byzantine road which went via Artah and a gap in the Belus Massif, past Sarmada and al-Atharib. But Antioch had been created in spite of the agreement with the Byzantine Emperor to hand back former imperial lands. As a result it was threatened by Byzantine attack, usually directed through Cilicia, where the Armenians later established a powerful kingdom. Moreover, the expansion of Antioch would have been greatly facilitated by cooperation with the crusader principality of Edessa, but in practice relations were not always good. Despite these diversions, by 1119 Antioch threatened an encirclement of Aleppo which was only prevented when Prince Roger of Antioch was defeated and killed at the ‘Field of Blood’. Within a few years the Antiochenes had recovered most of what they had lost. It was the 17
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outbreak of internal conflict and the dominance of Byzantine power from the mid-twelfth century which weakened them, coupled with the rise, after 1126, of a strong Islamic power in Aleppo under Zengi, but even so they continued to be ready to be aggressive.33
The Kingdom of Jerusalem had different choices. At Tripoli the First Crusade had resolved not to go to Jerusalem inland via Damascus, but at Ramla the leaders considered an attack on Egypt as an alternative to the siege of Jerusalem.34 These two possible axes of attack set the strategic dilemma for the kingdom. Both were tempting. Damascus was easily accessible from the Galilee across the bare landscape of the Hauran, which posed no significant barrier, though it is fairly dry.
Baldwin II was especially active against Damascus between 1126 and 1129 when a crusade came from the west to his assistance, but suffered defeat at Marj as-Suffur. It has also been suggested that in the 1120s Jerusalem was consciously seeking a policy of ‘natural frontiers’, and that this underlay the expansion of Oultrejourdain down to the Red Sea and the search for a desert frontier based on Damascus. Whether there was ever such a doctrine is debatable, not least because the new lordship there was quickly granted out to vassal lords.35 Egypt was also close and constituted a real threat to the kingdom until the 1120s, but it suffered from internal divisions and the balance was clearly changing when Baldwin I died during an expedition there in 1118. The weakness of its Fatimid regime ultimately tempted Amalric I (1163–74) into major expeditions which ended in defeat by Nur ad-Din, who united Egypt and Syria.
The westerners who settled in the east therefore found themselves in a very hostile environment in which fighting was frequent and essential.36 The kingdom was not as weak as its small size might indicate. It was anchored by powerfully fortified cities like Tyre, Acre and Jerusalem. In addition the crusaders very soon built numerous castles. These were products of the structure of lordship which they brought with them to the east, but they served as refuges and supply bases in times of trouble. Most of them were rather small. It was only in exposed areas like Oultrejourdain that mightier structures, like Kerak and Shawbak, were erected. As the threat from Muslim attack became more marked, the crusaders developed stronger castles, most notably Belvoir (built in 1168–70), which was a superbly designed concentric fortress of a kind which did not appear in Europe until nearly a century later. In the thirteenth century such amazing structures as Crac des Chevaliers and Marqab appeared. But the strength of the kingdom in the twelfth century essentially rested on the combination of strong cities and a powerful field army. To conquer the kingdom, an enemy needed to seize the cities and castles, but this invited attack from the field army, which could count on assistance from the many castles.37
Moreover, recent research has shown that although westerners were relatively few in the kingdom, they seem to have enjoyed the support of the native Christians, whom they treated very generously. This probably explains why, in the emergency of 1187, the kingdom could raise nearly 20,000 troops.38 The Latins essentially retained their western style of war. It was successful, and they were 18
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constantly receiving reinforcements and immigrants from Europe. However, they recognised the need to adapt their military methods to the radically different environment in which they found themselves and did so to a degree which historians have been slow to appreciate.39
The settlers employed ‘Turcopoles’, mounted archers, like the Turks, whom they used for reconnaissance and raiding. They were quite numerous, perhaps 1,500 in the campaign of 1183 and, apparently, many more at Hattin in 1187.
On 20 June 1192 they spotted an Egyptian convoy bringing supplies to Saladin’s army in Jerusalem, enabling Richard of England to seize it.40 But they were simply not numerous enough for the Latins to change their tactics radically, and on occasion they seem to have been incorporated into the mass of knights who formed the key element in their host.
The knights were the key military asset of the Latins, and the concerted mass charge their primary tactic. This was essentially an innovation of the Franks of the east. Western armies were, as we have noted, incoherent and lacked the discipline to manage such a tactic. At Hastings, William committed his cavalry only in sections and elements within them chose to make their attacks in whatever ways suited them best. The cavalry combat in 1214 at the Battle of Bouvines consisted of charges by retinues numbering fewer than 200 knights. Only at Muret in 1213
was there an all-out charge of massed cavalry. 41 But the armies of the Latins were called together frequently, so they grew used to working together, and this enabled them to form and to take the enormous risk of a mass charge. But this in turn led to further tactical changes. There could be only a single opportunity for a mass charge, because if i
t did not strike its enemy a fatal blow the horses would be blown and dispersed. Turkish light horse were skilled at the rapid retreat, even the feigned retreat, turning to fall on their exhausted enemies:
If they [the Turks] are hotly pursued a long way they flee on very fast horses. There are none nimbler in the world, with the swiftest gallop –
like a flight of swallows. It is the Turks’ habit, when they realise that their pursuit has stopped following them, to stop running away themselves –
like an infuriating fire which flies away if you drive it off and returns when you stop.42
But in awaiting the crucial moment Latin cavalry would be exposed to harassment, and in any case battle was a dynamic environment. And the Latins were usually outnumbered by their enemies, so the basic formation of infantry and cavalry evolved into the fighting march, as Smail was the first to understand.43 In 1147
the Latins under Baldwin III (1143–63) had marched on Bosra but found Nur ad-Din in great strength, so they were forced to retreat in the presence of an enemy army which outnumbered them. Their response was:
General orders had been given that the bodies of all the dead in the Christian ranks were to be placed upon camels and other pack animals, 19
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that the knowledge of the massacre of our forces might not tend to
strengthen the enemy. The weak and wounded were also to be placed on beasts of burden so as to give the impression that not a single Christian had been killed or wounded. It was a source of amazement, therefore, to the wiser heads among the enemy that, after such a volley of arrow, such repeated conflicts, such torture of thirst, dust and unbearable heat, not a single dead Christian could be found. This people must, indeed, be made of iron, they thought.44