SCRIPT - The Strategy of the Crusades, 1096-1202 (28/04/2017)

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 2^nd 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 3^rd 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-3^rd 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-13^th 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.

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