WEAPONS
Except against pagans in the Baltic, crusade armies enjoyed no significant technological advantages over their opponents. Different social and economic conditions determined contrasting resources, training and battlefield tactics, as in the contrast between the mass male military habits of the horsemen of the Eurasian steppes and the selective mounted elites of the sedentary societies of Europe and the Near East. Emphasis consequently varied in the balance of infantry and cavalry, mounted or foot archers, close combat or mobile harrying. However, the fundamental tools of war were broadly similar, especially between crusaders and their Syrian Arab, Egyptian Fatimid or Iberian Moorish enemies: swords, bows, spears, lances, maces, axes, body armour and artillery.
Swords used by western European crusading knights could be around 75 cm long, sometimes longer, with two-edged blades, weighing around 1.5 kg, designed more for hacking and cutting than stabbing or thrusting (which may have been the function of daggers in close combat). Good swords were expensive, symbols as well as equipment for the socially elevated. Sword pommels could be decorated, part of a ubiquitous visual aesthetic of war that even extended to painted arrow shafts. Near Eastern straight swords, which tended to be narrower, were used alongside curved sabres. The best blades were western European, Chinese or Indian, and could be traded over thousands of miles: in one mid-thirteenth-century case (see p. 104) a Chinese sword appears to have reached Touraine in northern France via Syria, brought by a returning crusader. The intimacy of battle made the sword a central weapon for knights fighting on horseback or on foot. While lances and javelins were also used as offensive weapons, spears were employed by infantry in defence, to help shield cavalry or secure positions. Infantry also used weapons derived from agriculture – axes, flails, picks. Both infantry and cavalry on all sides used daggers and maces.
The most common civilian utensil used in war was the bow. Because of its importance in hunting, the simple bow, used by all fighting forces, was not socially exclusive to elites or commoners. Some regions – such as Wales or Armenia – seemed to specialise in producing archers. Given the limited range of the simple bow dependent on basic muscle power, crossbows (or arbelasts) became popular as being more effective and over a much longer range; both aspects led to a wholly ineffectual ban by the Second Lateran Council in 1139 on use of the crossbow by Christians against any except the infidel, who also widely employed it. Only when the native Prussians acquired crossbow technology in the 1260s could they mount a real challenge to the Teutonic Knights. The longbow probably featured in Richard I’s army on the Third Crusade. Archers played a central role in all forms of battles and sieges, to pin down the enemy, inflict casualties at long range, weaken opponents’ resolve, and disrupt formations. They operated most effectively in open battle when coordinated with the cavalry or in sieges. The exception was the composite bow, made of wood, bone or horn and sinew, the weapon of the steppe horseman, essential to the Turkish tactic of harrying and feint.
70. Weapons of war: bows, spears, axes, swords.
Besides hand-held weaponry, artillery (throwing machines such as mangonels, petraries, trebuchets) was deployed extensively during the many sieges that dominated warfare in the Near East (see ‘Sieges’, p. 372). Eastern Mediterranean armies, but not crusaders or Outremer Franks it seems, also used Greek Fire, sometimes in grenade form.
Armour was conditioned by class and function. The western knight customarily wore a hauberk or body armour of chain mail (weight c. 11kg) with, by around 1200, added mail head cover (coif), leggings and mittens. Helmets were conical, rounded or pothelms, cylindrical with flat tops. Visors were introduced to help sight, breathing and ventilation. Chain mail and metal helmets were also used by Turkish and Arab mounted warriors. Shields were of wood and leather, kite-shaped with the Franks; small and round for the Turks. Plate armour began to be introduced in the west from the late twelfth century, but slowly. Surcoats were worn to reduce the heat of the metal armour that was worn over leather or textile padding. Horses could also be protected by various forms of armour. Turkish horses tended to be smaller than their Frankish counterparts, as the Turkish steppe environment precluded protected stud farms to selectively breed equine height and strength, a difference that literally supported the contrasting fighting traditions – the lighter-armed Turkish mounted archer against the heavily mailed Franks, who found the lack of suitable local horses a problem on long crusading campaigns.28 Most fighters wore little protective clothing beyond perhaps a leather tunic; armour was sometimes improvised from kitchen pots and pans. The effectiveness of weaponry is attested by the archaeological evidence of wounds inflicted, direct testimony to the butchery of battle and the tenacity or courage of those involved.
Consequences
The timing of Saladin’s death poses one of the many ‘what ifs?’ surrounding the Third Crusade: what if Saladin had pressed the siege of Tyre or the annexation of Antioch in 1188 or had not released Guy of Lusignan in 1189; or Frederick Barbarossa’s great army had reached Syria in 1190; or Richard had risked an assault on a nervous and panicked Jerusalem in January or June 1192; or he had been allowed to secure Ascalon before Saladin dismantled its fortifications in September 1191; or if he had arrived too late to relieve Jaffa in July 1192? The lasting impact of the Third Crusade rested on none of these, but on the striking conclusion of the transcendent redemptive mission and mass mobilisation of 1187–90 in the realpolitik treaty of Jaffa and the division of power over Palestine. The subsequent rhythm of Holy Land crusades was set by the expiry of the truces such as that of 1192 as much as by special political crises, and ended in negotiated agreements, usually to the crusaders’ disadvantage. The failure to take Jerusalem in 1192 imposed military and logistical reality on future planners and recast the terms of propaganda. Richard’s appreciation of the crucial importance of Egypt to the security of a restored Jerusalem became standard in theory and practice. The focus for recovery shifted, becoming the near-permanent business of the Holy Land, negotium terrae sanctae. In material terms, the Third Crusade bequeathed an example of tightly organised preaching, a carefully modulated coherent propaganda message, innovative financial expedients, and new strategies for sea transport, diplomacy and military objectives. However, the human cost was devastating. Out of ten leading companions of Duke Leopold V of Austria, nine died on the crusade. One veteran declared that of the 12,000 who arrived at Acre early in 1190, barely 100 were still alive by the summer of 1191. A sceptical observer from northern England reckoned a casualty rate of 75 per cent, while a confidant of Saladin quoted the Jerusalemite noble Balian of Ibelin as telling him that fewer than half of the westerners returned home.29 Many of those who did had endured privations horrifying even by the standards of war. Not a few wondered at the price.
10. The Palestine campaigns and the battle of Arsuf.
The experience of the Third Crusade also challenged the idea, popular with its promoters, that crusading represented a contest between irrecon-cilable opponents. It never did. Saladin’s accommodating treatment of Outremer refugees and captives was just as typical of exchanges with the Franks as his massacre of members of the Military Orders after Hattin or the summary execution of prisoners after the killings at Acre. Third Crusade commanders’ integration of war with diplomacy followed an Outremer tradition established during the First Crusade and pursued consistently thereafter. Frederick Barbarossa’s pre-crusade treaty with Iconium operated as part of a pragmatic not confessional foreign policy. Arriving at Latakia in July 1188, Admiral Margarit of Sicily visited Saladin to warn him to his face of the impending onslaught from the west.30 Both Richard and Philip began talks with Saladin as soon as they arrived at Acre; members of the local baronage never stopped dialogue with the sultan. Each side dealt with the other as fellow politicians not devils incarnate, a realism reflected in Richard’s message to Saladin in July 1192: ‘You and we together are ruined; our best course is to stop the bloodshed’.31 After the Jaffa truce, Bishop Hubert Wal
ter of Salisbury, unlike Richard, took advantage of the chance offered by the treaty to redeem his vows at the Holy Sepulchre. While in Jerusalem, he held convivial meetings with Saladin at which they gossiped about the qualities and failings of Richard I, and Walter persuaded the sultan to allow Latin clergy to officiate at the major Christian shrines in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth. Such encounters stood far removed from the cartoonish demonisation of Saladin in the west four years earlier. Links across the battle lines were not confined to diplomacy. On one occasion during his negotiations with al-Adil, Richard I asked to hear Arabic song, leading to a command performance by a local harp-playing chanteuse that the king apparently enjoyed. Among the booty from a great caravan captured by Richard’s troops in June 1192 were notebooks belonging to a prominent Iraqi geographer and traveller, al-Harawi.32 Once checked for military secrets (there were none), the notes were offered back to al-Harawi with an offer of compensation and an invitation to meet the king, which was declined. After the crusaders’ departure, Henry of Champagne apparently sought and received robes and a turban from Saladin, which he wore as a sign of mutual respect.33 For all the hostile rhetoric and pointedly crafted memories, while the Third Crusade perfected faith propaganda it also exposed how material accommodation was necessary to fulfil religious ambition. The following century was dominated by these two apparent opposites.
71. Hubert Walter’s sandals, buskin and amice, buried with him and more than forty items of luxury textiles in 1205.
Socially and institutionally, the Third Crusade transformed the business of the cross. Rhetorically, the emotionally and politically inadequate result stood in lasting rebuke to the sins of Christendom. Increasingly crusading was cited as a metaphor for Christian struggle as the mass public involvement of 1188–92 extended its social reach. Privileges began to be offered beyond those who fought, with vow redemptions purchased by the wealthy. Pope Clement III (1187–91) offered shares in crusade indulgences to those who sent aid or proxies.34 The extension of crusade privileges to non-combatants developed widely over the following century, broadening into a system of alms giving, partial rewards, vow redemptions and direct purchase of indulgences that extended the embrace of crusading far beyond those who took the cross, embedding it as a normative feature of western Christendom’s devotional habits.
The German Crusade, 1195–8
The Third Crusade’s immediate political legacy lay in the frequency of campaigns away from the Levant to which some or all of crusade elements – papal authority, vow, cross, preaching, spiritual and temporal privileges associated with the Jerusalem war – were applied. By the end of the 1190s, wars equated to Near East crusading, chiefly through remission of sins, had been proclaimed in Spain (including, in 1197, a crusade against a renegade Christian King Alfonso IX of León) and the north-east Baltic.35 The nonagenarian Pope Celestine III (1191–8), a veteran of papal legations to Spain that encouraged wars against the Moors, proved an enthusiast. In the Holy Land the three-year truce of 1192 imposed its own timetable. The German crusade of 1195–8 marked the start of regular Holy Land crusades between 1192 and 1271. The new crusade was initiated early in 1195 by Emperor Henry VI of Germany out of personal commitment, dynastic tradition and political ambition.36
Having secured the throne of Sicily late in 1194 as husband to the legitimate heiress, Constance, Henry VI controlled suitable ports for a new eastern campaign. Successor, son and great-nephew of previous royal crusaders, Frederick Barbarossa and Conrad III respectively, Henry’s interest in the eastern Mediterranean was more than sentimental. As part of his preparations, Henry consolidated imperial links with local rulers. In return for homage, he gave crowns to Aimery of Lusignan, ruler of Cyprus since the death of his brother Guy in 1194, and to Leo II of Cilician Armenia (Aimery was crowned by the bishop of Hildesheim in September 1197, Leo by the archbishop of Mainz in January 1198). Only after Henry’s announcement of a crusade at Easter 1195 was Pope Celestine persuaded to back it (August 1195). Henry planned to provide a substantial military core, demanding tribute as well as military aid from the new Byzantine emperor, Alexius III (1195–1203), to pay for it. The threat of a revival of Sicilian aggression in the Balkans in the event of Greek refusal was clear. The resulting so-called Alamanikon (i.e. German) tax was thus a form of protection money. Extremely unpopular in Byzantium, signalling a more focused approach to forcing Greek assistance for crusading, born of the frustrations of 1147 and 1189, this aggressive policy to extract Greek aid found extreme expression during the Fourth Crusade (1201–4).
Preparations for the German crusade were at least as thorough as for the Third Crusade, the total number of Germans who embarked probably nearly matching those in 1189. Although preaching had been authorised across western Europe, the venture remained a national enterprise. Despite chronic ill-health, Henry emphasised his commitment in taking the cross and at a series of imperial diets in 1195–6. Recruitment revolved around Hohenstaufen loyalists, in particular from southern and western Germany, and those with existing or dynastic crusade associations. Contingents came from Lübeck, Bremen, Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, Brabant, the Rhineland, Austria, Carinthia and Dalmatia. Departures were staggered across the spring and summer of 1197. A northern fleet of forty-four ships only arrived at the muster point of Messina in August; the main force reached Acre on 22 September, some months after the first arrivals. Cohesion was further compromised by the death of Henry in September 1197. Once in the Holy Land, the Germans managed to restore the Frankish position that had just been undermined by the accidental death of Henry of Champagne (he fell out of a window) and the loss of Jaffa to al-Adil, now sultan of Egypt, who had begun to unite the Ayyubid possessions under his leadership. In late October 1197 the Germans under Henry of Brabant recaptured Beirut and tried unsuccessfully to capture Toron in Galilee (November 1197–Februry 1198). Under German auspices the Jerusalem succession was settled in January 1198 by the marriage of Queen Isabel (her fourth at the age of twenty-five) to Aimery of Lusignan, who now added the crown of Jerusalem to that of Cyprus. News of the death of Henry VI and the desire of King Aimery to avoid further military provocation led to a truce with al-Adil that lasted from July 1198 to 1204. Beirut was retained by the Franks; Jaffa by al-Adil (it was returned by diplomacy in 1204).
THE SOCIOLOGY OF CRUSADING: WHO WENT?
The traditional image of crusaders depicts lords, knights and undifferentiated infantry, with the occasional addition of camp-followers and hangers-on. Emphasis is often afforded the contrast between the rich, and their followers, and the so-called poor, often characterised as undisciplined feckless zealots. In action and by promotion a gendered activity, the role of women was ignored, under-estimated, denigrated or caricatured by largely misogynist clerical observers (see ‘Women and the Crusade’, p. 10). The reality was more complicated, mirroring increasingly diverse social structures in western Europe. No one embarked on crusade, or got very far, without assets, their own or those of a lord, employer, relative, neighbour, colleague, friend or fraternity. The term ‘poor’ represented a literary or theological construct more than a precise economic condition, at best a relative term embracing social and financial status, the unrich or the commoner, not just the impoverished or destitute. Campaign vicissitudes could alter status, a knight becoming, in one veteran’s phrase, a ‘pauper since yesterday’.37 Non-combatant pilgrims, accompanying crusade armies for protection, a feature of forces travelling overland, could be pressed into military service. This economic and social fluidity within large crusade forces was reflected in the repeated need for additional common funds to bail out the impoverished outside the normal structures of subsidy by occupation, lords, associates or employers. It may also be noted that not all those on crusade, perhaps particularly among the domestic servants, were necessarily crucesignati.
The enterprise was inevitably dominated by the wealthy, powerful and militarily adept from the social elite, the knights Urban II appealed to, Bernard of Clairvaux’s �
�mighty men of valour’.38 They provided the social, material, strategic and tactical leadership and warrior expertise. Surrounding them were men also trained in arms, either from lords’ own military entourages and client networks or from the wide circle of smaller landholders or property-holders. The clergy, from bishops to writing clerks, served the spiritual and bureaucratic needs of crusade armies, as well as, in many cases, leading their own regiments and assisting in military operations. The network of actually, potentially or partially self-funded crusaders was joined by prosperous burgesses, many of whose occupations were solely civilian not military. In some crusading arenas, such as the Baltic and on certain Mediterranean crusades, urban mercantile involvement proved crucial.
72. A demotic image from a thirteenth-century engraved ceramic.
Chronicles, government records, crusader wills and evidence from fund-raising property deals identify commoner crusaders with occupations that were integral to the military establishment: sergeants, squires, engineers, archers, crossbowmen, infantry troops, steersmen and sailors. These were joined by an array of household servants, officials and hangers-on: priests, clerks, pages, valets, cooks, dog-handlers, farriers, grooms, horse-boys, butlers, seneschals, stewards, marshals, constables, chamberlains, notaries, physicians, minstrels and laundresses (who doubled as de-lousers on the Third Crusade and probably on other campaigns). Wealthy crusaders travelled in often lavishly ostentatious style, display and consumption remaining part of the performance of lordship on crusade as elsewhere: some thirteenth-century crusaders’ wills expose truly astonishing levels of luxury. A wider circle of crusading artisans could provide necessary supporting services, some employed by the knightly leaders, others perhaps freelance: judges, academics, schoolmasters, rectors, vicars, provosts, archdeacons, merchants, moneychangers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, carters, ditchers, masons, millers, bakers, barbers, surgeons, physicians, butchers, weavers, fishmongers, cobblers, tailors, dyers, potters, vintners, peasants and prostitutes who, on Louis IX’s 1249–50 campaign in Egypt, appear to have been organised in brothels by members of the royal household.39 Disapproving clerical commentators suggested that crusading held special attractions for criminals, perhaps lured by the legal protection afforded crusaders, the need to make themselves scarce, or the potential pickings in the chaotic conditions of often cash-rich crusader camps. Within artisan categories status varied enormously: some dyers were international entrepreneurs, while master chefs operated on a far elevated social and economic plane from the scullions who defended the crusader camp at Constantinople with pots and pestles in 1203. Not all artisans were likely to have signed up to ply their trades on campaign, their occupations being recorded more as a means of identification in domestic legal and fiscal records. Nonetheless crusading can be seen as much as a phenomenon of artisans as of knights, of carpentry as much as of castles. Like other wars, crusading attracted a preponderance of young men. Yet the bulk of crusaders came from rural and urban underclasses. At the bottom of the scale, men and women took the cross with the most modest of incomes, small farmers and villeins teetering on the edge of serfdom with property worth only a few shillings a year.40
The World of the Crusades Page 25