The Crusades and the Near East
Page 5
In such a formation the infantry surrounded the cavalry and the pack animals in a moving fortress and held off the enemy, enabling the knights to choose when, or indeed if, to unloose their famous charge. Again in 1170, near Gaza: Terrified by the vast numbers, they began to crowd together more than usual, with the result that the very density of their ranks almost prevented any further advance. The infidels at once charged and tried to force them apart, but the Christians, by divine help, massed themselves even more closely together and withstood the enemy’s attack. Then at quickened pace they marched on to their destination where the entire army [250
knights and 2,000 foot] halted and set up tents.45
In July 1187 Saladin, with a huge army 30,000 strong, besieged Tiberias as the army of Jerusalem concentrated at Safforiyah, twenty-six kilometres to the west.
Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, decided to march to its relief, presumably trusting in the solidity of his formation to enable him to choose battle at will. At the heart of his army were three divisions of cavalry, something like 1,200 knights, each surrounded by infantry, in all nearly 20,000 men. But a march of twenty-six kilometres against a numerous and determined enemy was unprecedented, and there was no water along the route. They became exhausted and were encircled and destroyed at Hattin, and the kingdom fell.
But on the Third Crusade, Richard of England made the system work. After the fall of Acre to the crusader host, Richard set out southwards down the coast to seize the port of Jaffa, with his cavalry in three sections surrounded by infantry.
This time, water was plentiful because the road ran close to the sea, where the western fleet acted as a source of supply. The infantry, who bore the weight of the enemy attacks, were rotated so that they could rest between the army and the coast. Saladin’s mounted archers attacked the infantry screen but to little effect.
One of his advisers commented:
The enemy army was already in formation with the infantry surrounding it like a wall, wearing solid iron corselets and full-length well-made chain-mail, so that arrows were falling on them with no effect . . . I saw various individuals amongst the Franks with ten arrows fixed in their backs, pressing on in this fashion quite unconcerned.46
20
W A R F A R E I N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N
On 7 September 1191 Saladin deployed his army for battle close to Arsuf. Richard broke his cavalry into five divisions to facilitate control, and was anxious to hold his force together until he could, with a single charge, destroy his enemy totally.
In the event his rearguard, sorely provoked, charged prematurely, obliging him to commit his whole cavalry force. Even so, the damage to Saladin’s army was considerable:
The enemy’s situation worsened still more and the Muslims thought
they had them in their power. Eventually the first detachments of their infantry reached the plantations of Arsuf. Then their cavalry massed together and agreed on a charge, as they feared for their people and thought that only a charge would save them. I saw them grouped
together in the middle of the foot-soldiers. They took their lances and gave a shout as one man. The infantry opened gaps for them and they
charged in unison. One group charged our right wing, another our left, and the third our centre. It happened that I was in the centre which took to wholesale flight. My intention was to join the left wing, since it was nearer to me. I reached it after it had been broken utterly, so I thought to join the right wing, but then I saw that it had fled more calamitously than all the rest.47
But the most spectacular innovation of the Latins was the foundation of the military religious orders, of which the most important were the Hospital and the Temple. The latter was founded by a group of pious knights under the authority of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and their first task was to protect the pilgrim roads.
Once the order was recognised in 1128 it attracted recruits and generous donations, making it an enormously rich landowning institution. The Hospital was an older charitable institution caring for pilgrims which gradually evolved into a fighting order.48 The bulk of the wealth of both orders lay in the west, so that they could replace losses in the east. The importance of these orders was that they formed what were, in effect, small but well-disciplined standing armies, each numbering about 300 knights. They accounted, therefore, for about half the 1,200 knights raised for the army which fought at Hattin. The Temple evolved very strict military discipline which was embodied in their Rule.49 The armies of the orders therefore formed the backbone of the army of Jerusalem, so it is hardly surprising that after Hattin, Saladin ordered that the 300 of their knights who had fallen into his hands should be massacred.50 However, the orders recovered, and during the Third Crusade they were joined by the new Teutonic Order.51 In the thirteenth century, when the Jerusalem monarchy was weak, the armies of the orders constituted the primary military forces in the kingdom, especially as more and more castles were handed over to them by a nobility that could hardly afford them. The orders became increasingly enmeshed in the politics of the kingdom, yet they still offered the strongest hope of recovery, and visiting rulers and pilgrims put much-deserved faith in their fighting qualities.52
21
J O H N F R A N C E
The crusades precipitated a period of ideological warfare in the Middle East. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Urban II preached salvation through slaughter, a notion that inspired men to go east to fight for many centuries. In the Middle East most warfare had long been between Muslims, and in these circumstances holy war, jihad, had simply faded away. Al-Sulami of Damascus was one of the few people at the time of the First Crusade to think in these terms.53 But as the challenge of the Latin settlers became clearer, the Turkish soldiers who ruled Islamic society increasingly presented themselves as champions of Islam. Zengi of Aleppo seized Edessa in 1144 and his son, Nur ad-Din, was a subtle diplomat who patronised and capitalised on the prestige of Muslim madrassas (Islamic schools) to promulgate a suitable image of himself. Saladin did likewise. These leaders at the same time proclaimed themselves champions of Sunni (orthodox) Islam and directed their jihad against all dissidents, especially Shi’ites. The alien ruling group in this way used jihad to build bridges with the broad mass of the city populations on whom they depended for taxation and the running of the machinery of government. Thus the temper of warfare in the Middle East was something special and different from that experienced elsewhere. William of Tyre, who was born in Jerusalem, rightly observed:
War is waged differently and less vigorously between men who hold the same law and faith. For even if no other cause for hatred exists, the fact that the combatants do not share the same articles of faith is sufficient reason for constant quarrelling and enmity.54
There were terrible events. In 1099 Jerusalem fell and many of its inhabitants were massacred, but it should be noted that this was the normal fate of any city which resisted until it was stormed, at which point nobody really could control the attackers. When Zengi captured Edessa in 1144 he ordered a terrible massacre of its Latin population, while sparing the eastern Christians. Saladin killed all the captured members of the orders after Hattin in 1187. Richard of England promised to respect the lives of the garrison of Acre when it capitulated in 1191, on condition that Saladin pay a ransom. When this was not forthcoming, he killed them all, some 2,600 men, women and children. In response Saladin ordered that prisoners captured as Richard’s army moved south should be executed. But this was not the Ostfront in the Second World War, and while war was savage it was never total.
We have some of our most vivid portrayals of battle from the crusades, like Joinville’s recollections of the Battle of Mansourah in 1250:
A blow from one of the enemy’s swords landed in the middle of Erard
de Siverey’s face, cutting through his nose so that it was left dangling over his lips. At that moment the thought of St James [of Compostella]
came into my mind and I prayed to him: ‘Good Sai
nt James, come to my help, and save us in our great need.’55
22
W A R F A R E I N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N
But all medieval battles were like this. On 9 August 1160 Frederick Barbarossa was defeated at the Battle of Carcano and two days later some knights of Lodi and Cremona, rushing to his aid, were ambushed by the victorious Milanese in a marshy valley. But Carnevalo de Cuzego, a knight of Lodi who had taken refuge in the bushes, pulled a Milanese knight, Roger of S. Sceptiro, off his horse and suffocated him in the earth before he could call for help from his followers.56
Despite the excesses, in principle, both sides obeyed the general rules concerning the surrender of cities.57 In the aftermath of battle footsoldiers were massacred or enslaved, but this was the general rule everywhere. On the other hand, it was in the interests of the leaders on all sides to honour the custom of ransoming notables, so this was done.58 In the wake of St Louis’ surrender in 1250
his whole army was captured, but a significant proportion was ransomed. But such civilities were much more difficult to maintain in the heat of religious warfare, and the sheer distance between ransomers and those who held their nearest and dearest imposed great problems. In 1227 Pierre de Queivilliers, a Picard crusader, was captured and held at the castle of Sayhun. He died before his ransom could be arranged. Pierre may well have been held in a little cell halfway up the great rock-cut ditch of the castle, for carved into its wall is a Latin cross: a pathetic and rather personal reminder of the sacrifice of the Holy War.59
Notes
1 N.J.G. Pounds, An Economic History of Medieval Europe, London: Longman, 1974, esp. pp. 41–89.
2 John France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1000–1300, London: UCL
Press, 1999, pp. 55–7. It was common to describe this social and political situation as
‘feudal’, but this has been contested by the highly influential Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
3 ‘Aubrey II de Vere’ in H.C.G. Matthew (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–8.
4 AC XIII.8, p. 416.
5 France, Western Warfare, pp. 53–76; R.A. Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, London: Constable, 1969.
6 Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science, N.P. Milne (tr.), Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993, p. 108.
7 John France, ‘La guerre dans la France féodale’, Revue belge d’histoire militaire 23, 1979, 190–1.
8 RH IV.58–9.
9 ‘John of Worcester’, Chronicon, R.R. Darlington and P. McGurk (eds), 3, Oxford: Clarendon 1995, III.31–3.
10 Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle, R.C. Johnston (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon, 1981, p. 41, lines 34–5.
11 J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997, pp. 239–59; France, Western Warfare, pp. 181–4, 178–80.
12 John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 331.
13 OD, pp. 115–27; John Gillingham, Richard I, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999; J.M. Powell, Anatomy of Crusade 1213–21, Philadelphia: University of 23
J O H N F R A N C E
Pennsylvania, 1986; Jean Richard, St Louis, Crusader King of France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Jean Joinville, The Life of St Louis, in M.R.B. Shaw (ed. and tr.), Chronicles of the Crusades, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, pp. 218–19.
14 On the role of Turks in the Caliphate of Baghdad see Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 118–67; on the entry of the Seljuks see P.M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517, London: Longman, 1986, pp. 9–30; Sophie Berthier, ‘La citadelle de Damas: les apports d’une etude archéologique’, in Hugh Kennedy (ed.), Muslim Military Architecture in Greater Syria, Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 151–64.
15 GF 49.
16 Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk–I
¯lkha
¯nid War, 1260-1281,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
17 FC 193–5: ‘erant deputati numero CCCLX milia pugnatorum, scilicet sagittariorum mos enim eorum est talibus uti armis equites omnes. Nos autem utrinque pedites et equites
. . . nos ilico stupefacti mortique proximi, etiam multi laesi, mox dorsa fugae dedimus.
Nec hoc mirandum, quia nobis omnibus tale bellum erat incognitum.’ Translation from A.C. Krey, The First Crusade, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958, p. 117.
18 GF 19: ‘Mirabantur ergo nostri ualde unde esset exorta tanta multitudo Turcorum, et Arabum et Saracenorum, et aliorum quos enumerare ignoro; quia pene omnes montes et colles et ualles et omnia plana loca intus et extra undique erant cooperta de illa excommunicata generatione.’
19 G.A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest, Harlow: Longman, 2000; R.B. Yewdale, Bohemond I Prince of Antioch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1924; J. Flori, Bohémond d’Antioch, chevalier d’aventure, Paris: Payot, 2007; AC 326.
20 RA 244: ‘Etenim id moris pugnandi apud Turcos est, ut, licet pauciores sint, tamen semper nitantur hostes cingere suos: quot etiam in hoc bello facere conati sunt; sed prudentia Boamundi hostium insidiae praeventae sunt.’ Translation in Krey, The First Crusade, p. 135.
21 J.L. Cate, ‘The Crusade of 1101’, in K.M. Setton and M.W. Baldwin (eds), History of the Crusades, 6, Philadelphia and Madison: University of Pennsylvania Press and University of Wisconsin Press, 1955–86, I.343–68. For a more substantial treatment see A.C. Mulinder, The Crusading Expeditions of 1101–02, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Swansea University, 1996.
22 Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade, New Haven: Yale, 2007, pp. 178–9; OD
117–18.
23 Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, credo et lettre a Louis X, Natalis de Wailly (ed.
and tr.), Paris: Renouard, 1868, p. 98: ‘Moi et mes chevaliers nous décidâmes que nous irions courir sus à main guache dans leur camp, et nous leur courûmes sus.’ Translation from Joinville, Life of St Louis, p. 220.
24 France, Victory in the East, pp. 325–56.
25 FC 559, 735.
26 The best discussion of western methods is Randall Rogers, Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
27 John France, ‘Siege Conventions in Western Europe and the Latin East’, in P. de Souza and J. France (eds), War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 159–72.
28 There is an unpublished thesis on the subject: S.M. Foster, S ome Aspects of Maritime Activity and the Use of Sea-power in Relation to the Crusading States, D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1978.
29 France, Victory in the East, pp. 209–20; and John France, ‘The First Crusade as a Naval Enterprise’, Mariner’s Mirror 4, 1997, 389–97.
24
W A R F A R E I N T H E M E D I T E R R A N E A N
30 J.H. Pryor, Geography,Technology and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean 649–1571, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, and
‘“Water, Water Everywhere, nor Any Drop to Drink”: Water Supplies for the Fleets of the First Crusade’, in Michel Balard (ed.), Dei gesta per Francos: Études sur les croisades dédiées à Jean Richard, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, pp. 21–8.
31 A.S. Ehrenkreutz, ‘The Place of Saladin in the Naval History of the Mediterranean Sea in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 74, 1955, 100–16.
32 John France, ‘Thinking about Crusader Strategy’, in Naill Christie and Maya Yazigi (eds), Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities, Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 75–96.
33 Thomas Asbridge, ‘The Significance and Causes of the Battle of the Field of Blood’, Journal of Medieval History 23, 1997, 301–16; and Thomas Asbridge, The Creat
ion of the Principality of Antioch, 1098–1130, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000.
34 RA 292.
35 Joshua Prawer, Crusader Institutions, Oxford: Clarendon, 1980, pp. 471–83.
36 The study of crusading warfare focuses substantially upon the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, about which we are better informed. The greatest work on the subject is R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare 1097–1193, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, C. Marshall (ed.), 1995 [1956], which remains the foremost authority.
For the thirteenth century see Christopher Marshall, Warfare in the Latin East 1192–1291, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
37 For an introduction to crusader castles see Hugh Kennedy, Crusader Castles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, while Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, indicates how castle-building changed to meet the Muslim threat.
38 These ideas about the native Christians have considerably changed our view of the kingdom, and arise from the combination of historical source material and recent archaeology to be found in Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 and Ellenblum, Crusader Castles.
39 What follows is drawn from John France, ‘Crusading Warfare and its Adaptation to Eastern Conditions in the Twelfth Century’, Mediterranean Historical Review 15, 2000, 49–66, which is the only attempt so far to consider this subject.
40 Yuval Harari, ‘The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles’, Mediterranean Historical Review 12, 1997, 79–86 provides a fine treatment of this subject, though his suggestion that Turcopoles were Franks is controversial. I suspect they were largely recruited from among the native Christians and the Bedouin, many of whom became able allies of the Latins. For the capture of the caravan, Ambroise, Estoire le la Guerre Sainte, Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber (eds), 2, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003, II.10285–510.