The Strategy of the Crusades
To be
honest, the title’s a bit misleading: neither the Crusaders nor the Muslims had
a grand strategy, and in any case fragmented medieval governments could not
execute such plans. Rather, this video is about the strategic problems each
side faced, and their responses.
Geography
The Crusader
States of Outremer - Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem - occupied 600
kilometers of the coast from Anatolia to the Sinai. It was shielded by
mountains to its north and east and deserts to its south, separating it from inland
Syria and Egypt. Agriculture flourished in the valleys.
Trade-wise, the
region served as a transit point for Silk Road goods to Europe, as well as for Muslim
caravans from Egypt to Syria and Arabia.
The region
was ethnically and religiously mixed, home to Armenians, Arabs, Jews, Sunnis,
Shi’ites, and Druze – to mention a few – and on the eve of the Crusades they
were overseen by a Turkic ruling class and an Arab religious ulama class.
The First Crusade (1096-1101)
The First
Crusade – or more accurately, one of
the three Crusading armies raised between 1096 and 1101 – achieved victory
through entering a convenient power vacuum. Infighting after the collapse of
the Seljuk Empire meant that the main Sunni powers – Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul
in Iraq – could not coordinate amongst themselves, much less with the Shi’ite
Fatimids in Egypt.
The Muslims
also misread the Crusaders, believing that they desired border conquests like other
Christians before them. But then again, the First Crusade was indeed
unprecedented in scale, involving 130,000 fanatics across Europe willing to
suffer extreme casualties for Jerusalem.
In any case,
Muslim disunity had real consequences: while their heavy cavalry could match Frankish
knights, none of the Muslim powers individually had enough of them. As such,
their armies failed in conventional battle, while the Crusaders found counters
to Muslim hit-and-run tactics. Even the
Crusader massacres had a strategic effect, as garrisons fled before they were
besieged and cities surrendered rather than fight. Thus was Outremer conquered
by the Crusaders: now, the question was how to defend it.
The Intermediate Period (1101-1183)
The key
problem facing the Crusader defence was a lack of permanent manpower. Most Crusaders
went home after fighting: at other times, only two thousand knights remained in
Outremer. Without enough soldiers, the Crusaders were stretched thin – barely able
to defend themselves, much less make further conquests.
The problem
was partly self-inflicted. Firstly, the Crusader elite excluded non-Catholics
and never fully utilized local manpower. Secondly, Crusader unity – pretty weak
to begin with – quickly collapsed, with Jerusalem arguing with the other states
and factions fighting for control within the Kingdom itself. The Crusaders even
ruined their relationship with Europe after the 2nd Crusade, meaning
that few leaders went to Outremer between 1150 and 1180.
For their
part, the Crusaders developed three responses to their manpower problem: settlement,
castles and military orders.
During the
First Crusade, the Crusaders drove natives away from the cities and took their
place as permanent inhabitants. Settlers from Mediterranean Europe were
encouraged to immigrate through offers of cheap farmland, along with criminals deported
to Outremer. Successful settlement, however, still depended on the Crusaders
being able to secure the land first, and without the manpower to prevent Muslim
raiding, these efforts withered on the vine.
Castles
became a key component of the Crusader defence – but with garrisons of only a
couple hundred soldiers, most Crusader castles were not expected to block
armies or hold key positions. Instead, castles were a way of preserving
manpower, acting as places of refuge where defeated Crusaders could flee to
instead of being captured and annihilated.
Castles were
also bases from which to hold off and distract the enemy, but the Crusaders’
defensive strategy rested upon a sort of defense-in-depth where, in the face of
invasion, castle garrisons would combine to form an impromptu field army. It
was this field army that would then drive off or defeat the enemy.
The field
army was what ultimately ensured Outremer’s security. If it was lost, their
castles, without their garrisons, were essentially helpless before the enemy,
and the Crusader defence would collapse – as happened to Edessa and Antioch
after their defeats. The Crusaders could, therefore, not afford to lose their
military edge.
Part of this
edge was provided by the Military Orders, who, by virtue of vast estates in
Europe, were able to build castles beyond what local lords could afford;
significantly, they could also be sent to remote and desolate strongholds. In
war, the Templars and Hospitallers were each able to raise about 300 of the all-important
Frankish knights, expert in the land and its people. But their status as
permanent settlers also meant that the Muslims tended to execute rather than
ransom them, making defeat all the more catastrophic for them.
The
Crusaders were therefore staking a lot on battle, the risk of which was high
and increasing. Frankish knights remained formidable, but the adoption of the Turkic
cavalry archer meant that the Muslims were increasingly able to lure Crusader
armies beyond retreating range of their castles. For their part, the Crusaders
also tried non-conventional warfare, most notably in Reynald of Chatillon’s
raids against Muslim caravans. They also invaded Egypt in an attempt to maintain
the Fatimid regime against the Sunnis.
Ultimately,
the Crusaders could not prevent Muslim consolidation. Despite a succession
system which partitioned realms amongst a ruler’s sons, the Muslim ulama was pushing for unity for the
purposes of jihad. Zengi, the ruler
of Mosul and Aleppo, declared himself a ghazi
or holy warrior after his capture of Edessa, making his realm the destination
for jihadi funds and warriors. His
son, Nur ad-Din, leveraged this status to take over Damascus and Egypt;
Saladin, the vizier of Egypt, assumed ghazi
status after his death and re-united Egypt with Damascus and Aleppo, with the
Crusaders again powerless to stop him.
With Syria
and Egypt united, the full force of the Muslims now fell on the Crusaders. When
Saladin took to the field in 1187, he brought with him an army of 30 thousand,
including 12 thousand light cavalry. The Crusaders, drawing on all their
resources, could only match him with an army of 20 thousand, including a little
over one thousand knights.
Hattin and the 3rd Crusade (1187-1198)
Unable to
withstand the political pressure of doing nothing while Saladin ravaged the
countryside, King Guy of Jerusalem attempted to engage the Muslim army. Lured
beyond retreating distance of friendly fortresses, the Crusader field army was
surrounded and annihilated at Hattin.
With most of
their garrisons lost, the Crusader castles had neither the men nor the hope of
holding out against Saladin, and between 1187-1189 the Muslims took almost
everything but Antioch, Tripoli and the port of Tyre.
The
Crusaders were seemingly on their last legs. Yet Saladin not only failed to
expel them, but it would in fact take another hundred years before the final
bastions would fall. The reason for this can be traced to a single event: Saladin’s
failure to capture Tyre.
Sea
transport sustained the Crusaders. With Anatolia too dangerous to cross, the
Eastern Mediterranean became the key route linking Outremer to Europe. Venice,
Genoa and Pisa would ship soldiers over during the sailing season, bring
luxuries back to Europe, and fight the Muslims if needed. By the 1120s, the
Italians had swept the Muslims out of the sea – and for their services, they
were granted tax exemption, city quarters, and favored rates on duties.
Medieval
galleys could row without resupply for only four days: friendly coasts were
therefore critical for naval control. And for the Crusaders in 1189, Tyre was
the only friendly harbor in Outremer large enough to supply an army capable of
fighting Saladin.
This army
came in the form of the 3rd Crusade, which landed at Tyre and recaptured Acre.
Ships were critical to this effort, as well as to Richard the Lionheart’s campaigns
along the coast: he decided against taking Jerusalem for fear of losing his
link to the sea. But the Crusaders were saved at a critical juncture, and with
Saladin’s death in 1193 Muslim unity fell apart once again.
Post-3rd Crusade (1198-1291)
Instead of
going out of style, Crusading was actually quite regular in the Late Middle
Ages. Yet these subsequent Crusades failed to change the fate of Outremer.
Two reasons
exist for this: firstly, new Crusades in Iberia and Prussia increasingly
competed with Outremer for manpower. Secondly, Crusading was slowly made subject
to national goals, which often did not involve Jerusalem: the 8th Crusade, for
example, was almost an entirely French undertaking, and its destination was
diverted to Tunis on behalf of the French King’s brother. Holy war was also taking
a backseat to trade, not just for the Italian merchant states, but also for the
Orientalized Crusaders as well.
Despite
this, the Muslims remained unable to stop Crusaders landing in Outremer. The
5th and 7th Crusades attacked Egypt intending to exchange it for Jerusalem,
while the 6th Crusade obtained the city through diplomacy. The Muslims, caught
up in the internal feuds of the Ayyubids, spared little thought towards jihad.
This
stalemate ended with the Mamluks, who reunified Syria and Egypt by the mid-13th
Century. Not only did the Muslims regain their advantage in numbers, but Mamluk
cavalry were more than capable of defeating Frankish knights one-on-one. They
retook Jerusalem, destroyed the last Crusader field army at La Forbie, and turned
back the Mongols at Ain Jalut.
But there
was still the possibility of reinforcement from Europe. In order to prevent this,
the Mamluks destroyed the castles, towns and especially ports of Outremer,
enslaving or massacring any Franks who remained. The last vestiges of the
Crusader States were isolated and destroyed: Antioch in 1268, Tripoli in 1289,
and Acre in 1291. Europeans still controlled the sea, but without bases on the
coast they were reduced to raiding, rather than the invasions of the past two
centuries.
Conclusion
The security
of the Crusader States relied on Muslim disunity. Once that disappeared, their numerical
inferiority quickly worked against them. The Crusaders depended on battlefield
success for survival, uncertain even in the best of times, and Europe could not
rescue them from defeat forever. Crusader failure wasn’t guaranteed, but
without a fundamental shift in their religious and ethnic orientation, the odds
were always going to be stacked against them.
Thanks for
watching the video!
No comments:
Post a Comment