The Crusades 1095-1197

by Jonathan Phillips

  Louis progressed via Ephesus and along the Maeander valley. In late December 1147, the French army scored a clear victory over the Turks and, to emphasise God’s hand in their triumph, the presence of a white-clad knight was reported. The French had coped with the usual Turkish tactics of fast attacks and feigned retreats and then managed to deliver an effective cavalry charge against the enemy. In light of the catastrophe that was to follow, this success is usually overlooked, but it is important to note that the main armies of the Second Crusade were not so ineffectual that they could not, if managed properly, achieve victory. On 7 January 1148, however, crossing the Cadmus mountains, the crusader force became too stretched out. The vanguard lost contact with the remainder of the army and seeing such disorder the Turks struck. Losses of men, horses and materials were substantial — the strength and spirit of Louis’s crusading army were broken. The survivors regrouped and belatedly acted to ensure that discipline was preserved in future. The Templars were given control of the order of the march and the crusaders were organised into confraternities temporary associations, bound together by oath — to keep order. This is an interesting development because it shows that within two decades of their approval as a religious military order just how seriously the Templars were regarded. The effectiveness of this arrangement can be demonstrated by the fact that the crusaders recorded several victories and they reached the southern coast of Asia Minor with few further losses.

  The crusade in the Latin East

  The French king arrived at Antioch in March 1148. Initially he was greeted with great enthusiasm by Prince Raymond who hoped to use his close family ties with Eleanor to persuade him to fight in northern Syria. Louis was unwilling to do this and the prince became hostile to him. The French army marched southwards, a move accompanied by strong rumours concerning one of the great scandals of medieval history. It was alleged that Raymond had become overly intimate with Queen Eleanor and for this reason Louis had refused to assist the Antiochenes. Whatever the truth in this — and contemporary church writers such as John of Salisbury, who met the French entourage in Rome on their journey home, report the episode in all seriousness — other reasons existed why the king should not campaign in the north at this time. Louis’s forces had been decimated in Asia Minor and he needed time to regroup and to join up with the other crusaders who had arrived by sea. More significantly though, he may have felt disinclined to fight alongside the Antiochenes, who, since 1145, were technically subject to Greek suzerainty. Why should he exert himself on behalf of the Antiochenes when it would benefit their Byzantine overlords, the very people who appeared to many to bear much of the responsibility for his losses in Asia Minor?

  In June 1148 a great assembly was held at Palmarea near Acre. Conrad, Louis, Melisende and Baldwin III, and the nobility of Jerusalem debated the crusaders’ next move. With Raymond’s non-co-operation, military activity in the north was now unlikely. In any case a second Muslim attack on Edessa in 1146 had destroyed much of the city and while the Franks still held some territory in the area it may well no longer have been worth trying to re-conquer. In the south the choice for an attack lay between Ascalon and Damascus. The former remained the sole port on the Levantine coast still in Muslim hands. The latter was the major Muslim power closest to Jerusalem and had recently become hostile to the settlers after a period of truce. The principal reason for this was a growing, if uneasy, rapprochement between the Damascenes and Nur ad-Din of Aleppo. Such a union would be prevented by the capture of Damascus.

  The siege of Damascus

  On 4 July 1148 the Christian armies reached the city. Accounts differ as to the development of the siege, but after early progress through the dense orchards on the south side of the city, some (Frankish) sources indicate that the Christians moved to the other side of Damascus to try to make a breakthrough, but finding little water there they were forced to withdraw only three days into the attack. After the hopes, expense and suffering of the crusade, to fail so quickly cut deep. The fallout from the collapse of the siege of Damascus was swift, wide-ranging and ferocious. A scapegoat had to be found for such an ignominious reversal. Conrad suspected that the settlers had been paid off by the Damascenes. William of Tyre, writing about thirty years later, offered a range of suggestions, but he reported that there were so many different versions of events he could not be sure what had happened. Explanations ranging from the bribery theory noted by Conrad to the meddling of Prince Raymond of Antioch, to a clash between Count Thierry of Flanders (who wanted control of the city for himself) and the local nobility (who resented a westerner benefiting from their decades of labour in the Levant) were put forward. Other writers indicated that the Templars and the Hospitallers were somehow responsible for the breakdown of the siege. Odo of Deuil’s account of the crusade stopped short of Damascus, but he made it plain that it was the treachery of the Greeks that had caused the principal damage to the expedition. Odo also noted the problems caused by non-combatants slowing up the main army and advised that they should not accompany future crusades. It was St Bernard who had the most awkward task: he had raised expectations to such a fever pitch that it was difficult to explain why God had not rewarded the efforts of the faithful. The abbot had to argue that the crusaders had not travelled with the right intent — had their hearts been pure they would have succeeded. One writer contrasted the triumph of the humble, lesser people at Lisbon with the defeat of the glory-seeking rulers at Damascus.

  In essence, the Second Crusade was damaging to the settlers and the papacy. Progress was made in the Iberian peninsula, but the lack of success in the Baltic and the despair and anger engendered by the defeat of the main armies cast a shadow over crusading for many years. The settlers would need to be both resourceful and wide-ranging in their attempts to secure outside help against the emerging strength of Muslim Syria.

  7

  Warfare, strategy and castles in the Levant

  The Frankish tenure of the Holy Land moved through phases of conquest, consolidation, expansion, defence, defeat and recovery between 1097 and 1197. Each of these episodes required a range of military skills, techniques and approaches to warfare, albeit with different emphases according to circumstance. Many aspects of military engagement were familiar to the Franks; for example, warfare in eleventh-century Europe was dominated by raids and battles and these forms of conflict would play a prominent role in the history of the Latin East. Other types of warfare, however, were new to the westerners, especially the tactics of their Muslim enemies and the intensive level of siege warfare, notably against urban settlements. The settlers’ lack of manpower also influenced their approach to military issues in terms of battle tactics and castle-building.

  Raids, strategy and battles

  Raiding was an integral part of life in the Levant and, aside from periods of truce, both sides engaged in this activity as a matter of course. The purposes of such raids were varied; they could be a prelude to a later invasion, they might be a decoy to lure opponents away from more serious military activity, but usually they were aimed at destroying or stealing crops and livestock. Document 16 ii clearly indicates the impact of a Muslim raid. One should not underestimate the psychological damage of such activities and the worry that they might be repeated. William of Tyre noted the fear engendered by the raid and in some border regions the threat must have been considerable. This, in turn, impacted upon settlement patterns because the majority of Frankish farmers in the kingdom of Jerusalem located themselves away from the vulnerable borders if possible. Document 16 ii also reveals that Saladin timed his incursion for maximum effect — to coincide with the gathering of the autumn harvest. This might mean serious damage to the economy and, on top of the natural disasters such as earthquakes and droughts so prevalent in the East, a series of raids could, and did, financially break many farmers and lesser nobles. It is noticeable that from the 1160s onwards appeals to the West called for money to help cushion the damage caused by the increasingly heavy Muslim incursio
ns, especially in northern Syria. It must be remembered that the Franks could raid Muslim territory too, and they might secure equally profitable rewards. But why did the settlers not choose to defend their lands in a more proactive fashion? If, as shown in Document 16 ii the Franks had troops in the vicinity of their enemy, why did they elect to retreat? William of Tyre reported that the settlers made no attempt to engage their opponents, but returned to their strongholds to wait for the Muslims to leave. William’s explanation for this approach was simple — the Franks wished to evade risk and by holding to the fortified places, they had, as they saw it, done an effective job. Stating the obvious, battles were dangerous, unpredictable events. They might spread out over a large area of land which rendered communication impossible, they could change in fortune very quickly and, most seriously for the loser, their outcome could be decisive: the death of a leader or a heavy loss of manpower might precipitate irreversible consequences and events such as the demise of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings were a lesson evident to all. By avoiding battle and its attendant dangers, the Franks lived to fight another day and the Muslims would retreat without taking the castles that were needed to conquer the land; in other words, in spite of the material damage incurred, the settlers’ military strength remained essentially intact.

  The rationale underlying this policy was dictated by the Franks’ perpetual problem: a lack of manpower. The dangers of a major setback became starker as the strength of their enemies grew. Heavy defeats at the Battles of Harran (1104) and The Field of Blood (1119) saw substantial losses of Frankish troops yet the Latin settlements survived, in part because the Muslims could not, at those points, follow up their victories with permanent large-scale conquests. By the 1160s, however, the situation was beginning to change, especially in northern Syria. At the Battle of Harim in 1164 Prince Bohemond III of Antioch and Count Raymond of Tripoli were captured and most of their knights killed. Nur ad-Din rampaged through the principality, destroying crops and capturing towns and castles in the border region, but the Muslim leader judged himself as lacking the capacity to take Antioch itself. As Nur ad-Din increased in strength, the Franks’ lack of manpower became even more critical and a contemporary appeal to the West after Harim observed that the sole remaining Frankish leader, King Amalric, was reluctant to engage in serious military activity because he had responsibilities to defend Antioch, Tripoli, Jerusalem and his interests in Egypt. Nur ad-Din, however, had ‘a superabundance of troops’ and could mount two campaigns simultaneously or sustain a defeat and still remain a threat.

  The principle of avoiding battle followed the ideas of Vegetius, a late fourth-century writer, whose De re militari was familiar to many military leaders in the medieval West. Such an approach ties in with William of Tyre’s comments in Document 16 ii and is also encapsulated in the famous lines of the twelfth-century Muslim writer Usamah Ibn-Munqidh: ‘Of all men the Franks are most cautious in warfare’ (Usamah Ibn-Munqidh, tr. Hitti, 2000: 42). Yet this picture is perhaps too beguiling; it did not, of course, preclude raids and incursions, and there is no doubt that the settlers did take positive action when the circumstances suited them. In 1115, Prince Roger of Antioch caught the Muslims unprepared for battle at Tall Danith and duly attacked, shattering the army of Bursuq of Mosul. In 1126, a raid on Damascus saw the Franks employ their feared cavalry charge to destroy a Muslim defence force and they won the day. Most overtly, in 1179, Reynald of Chatillon’s raid into the Red Sea (see pp. 129-30) is evidence of Frankish aggression. One calamitous example of the Franks mistakenly choosing to fight a battle was at Cresson on 1 May 1187 when 140 Templar and Hospitaller knights attacked a far larger force of Muslims (maybe 7,000 men). When the enemy was sighted, Gerard of Ridefort, the master of the Templars, thought it cowardly to retreat (as some advised) and led the Christian charge. A Frankish chronicler wrote: ‘The Saracens withstood them joyously and closed in on them so the Christians could not pass through’ (The Old French Continuation of William of Tyre, in The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade, tr. Edbury, 1996: 32). Only four knights, including ironically Gerard, escaped and all the others, among whom numbered the master of the Hospitallers, were captured or killed. While it is true that the Franks often chose not to fight and that some battles were hard to avoid because they had been lured into a trap, or caught by surprise, the comments of Usamah and William of Tyre should not be distorted and taken to mean a complete lack of aggression on the part of the settlers. These few examples — and many others could be cited — are testimony to Frankish combativeness.

  Battles were relatively common in eleventh-century Europe (less so in the twelfth), but the tactics encountered in the Levant would have been different from anything that the Franks had experienced in the West. A typical Frankish army in the East was formed as follows: the core of the army was the knights (secular knights and those of the military orders), well protected by their chain mail, helmets and kite-shaped shields, and whose most effective tactic was the charge. The impact of a mass of heavily armoured knights and their warhorses could be devastating, as Richard proved at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 (see below, p. 146). The problem for the Franks was that the charge required two essential conditions — a reasonably fixed target and relatively flat ground — that were rarely present. Given the strength of the charge, the Muslims did everything in their power to avoid facing it and their tactics did much to neutralise this threat.

  Muslim armies were also based around cavalry, the majority of whom were lightly armoured and highly-skilled archers who would repeatedly ride to within 50-80 metres of the Franks, release their arrows and retreat. At the Battle of Dorylaeum (July 1097), in the early stages of the First Crusade, the Franks were most unfamiliar with Muslim tactics. Fulcher of Chartres commented, ‘The Turks were howling like wolves and furiously shooting a cloud of arrows. We were stunned by this . . . to all of us such warfare was unknown’ (Fulcher of Chartres, tr. Ryan, 1969: 85). The purpose of this constant harassment was to break up the Frankish formation and clear the way for an attack by their own heavy cavalry. The temptation for the Franks to respond was enormous and Document 16 i shows how difficult it was to resist this provocation. It also indicates how often the Franks reacted to such goading, the measures needed to try to prevent such a response and, in the allegations of cowardice, a common retort to the order to hold fast. In the face of these tactics the only real option for the Christians was to stay in tight formation and hope that the enemy would come close enough to them, and in sufficient numbers, that they presented a target that could be hit. Timing and close formation were essential for the charge to work effectively. Even once it had struck home, it was vital to preserve discipline and not to pursue a defeated — or apparently defeated — enemy. The feigned retreat was a favourite tactic of the Muslims and if performed properly it could lure the most experienced Franks to their doom. Confronted by a Christian charge the Muslims would fall back and spread out far enough for the knights to begin to lose formation and then, possibly in conjunction with a force prepared for ambush, they would suddenly wheel to outflank the Franks and trap small groups of them.

  Acquiring the control not to respond to the Muslim archers was one lesson that the Christians needed to learn. It is known that the Byzantines had evolved such tactics prior to the crusades and they must have passed on this information to the First Crusaders. But the Franks also learned through their own experiences and, as France has so convincingly shown, in the course of the First Crusade, they formed a cohesive and tough force, capable of dealing with the challenges that they faced (France, 1994). The provocation from Muslim attacks was immense and there are reports of Frankish knights looking like porcupines on account of the arrows stuck in their chain mail (although the wearer was rarely harmed seriously); the horses fared less well and were often the main casualties which would slow down the Frankish march. Settler armies featured their own lightly-armed archers known as Turcopoles — men who were the result of mixed-race marriages in
the Levant. There was also a large proportion of infantrymen — archers who tried to protect the Christians’ cavalry by keeping the Muslim horsemen at a distance, as well as spearmen whose task was to cover the archers. Muslim forces also had footmen whose roles were similar. Both armies contained religious men to tend to the warriors’ spiritual well-being and to provide inspiration for the holy war: bishops and priests could often be found in the Frankish forces, while Sufis and Qu’aranic readers were present in Muslim armies. Likewise, each side had people to tend to their sick and wounded. The Hospitallers fulfilled this function for the Franks and we know of doctors, surgeons and pharmacists in the Muslim ranks.

  It is difficult to gauge the size of medieval armies because the sources often quote improbably high numbers (the army of the Second Crusade was not the 9,876,543 quoted by the Byzantine writer Niketas Choniates), but more realistic figures can be found. A letter written after the Battle of Harim (1164) noted that the prince of Antioch and the count of Tripoli put 600 knights into the field. The Assizes of the kingdom of Jerusalem (based on a legal document written in the mid-1180s) recorded that feudal service was owed for 675 knights (see Document 17). The Templars and Hospitallers could put forward about 300 knights each, which meant that at Hattin the forces of Jerusalem and the military orders were based around a core of 1,300 knights maximum. Estimates of foot soldiers indicate a further 15,000. To put this in perspective, Saladin’s forces were numbered about 20,000. The Franks, therefore, had little safety net, but Saladin could call upon the resources of his empire to replace or supplement his army. The creation of the military orders was one answer to the lack of manpower and it was often possible to augment the settlers’ forces with the services of knights from the annual pilgrim traffic. William of Tyre noted that during the siege of Ascalon in 1153 such was the need for extra troops that King Baldwin III compelled the western pilgrims present in the Holy Land to stay and fight for him in return for payment. There was also a small stream of westerners who came to the Holy Land to serve in its defence for a year or so as an act of piety. The future Count Charles the Good of Flanders did this in c. 1108, Count Fulk V of Anjou (later King Fulk of Jerusalem) in 1120, and Conrad (later King Conrad III of Germany) in 1124. In short, however, the Franks never solved the issue of limited military resources during the twelfth century.