The crusaders were not such incompetent zealots after all

One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to as our civilisation’s mentalité is the almost complete attenuation of memory about what the crusades were, why they were fought and what part they played in a multi-century struggle between two successful, expansionary and universal religions. Though this struggle is still being waged today, we’ve become expert at not noticing it.

Even at the level of military history, the crusaders have been written off with a hastily scribbled judgment that amounts to: ‘Invaded the Middle East and captured Jerusalem. Eventually driven into the sea by the brilliant generalship of Saladin.’ In 1954 Major General J.F.C. Fuller in his Military History of the Western World reminded his readers that the Byzantines saw the Franks (a collective term for crusaders, wherever they hailed from) as illiterate barbarians, and dismissively pinned their failure to capture Damascus on their ‘ignorance of strategy’.

Were the crusaders little more than incompetent zealots? Against this charge, Steve Tibble throws down the gauntlet. The author of previous scholarly works on crusader armies and on the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, he argues in his latest book that these ‘barbarians’ were also strategic thinkers — at least more often than not.

The crusaders became victims of their own success when many headed home, believing the job well done

He is at pains to define his terms, carefully distinguishing concepts that describe various scales of action: ‘policy’, at the elevated level of setting political goals; ‘tactics’, at the ground level of building castles and fighting battles; and ‘strategy’, as the complicated decision-making layer connecting the two, a layer that makes policy real and tactics meaningful. By focusing on decisions and actions, Tibble argues persuasively that although the crusaders lacked the jargon and analytical apparatus of what we now (often incorrectly) call ‘strategy’, their ability to support policy by actions repeated over time and modified in the light of constraints properly amounted to just that.