School of War - Ep 151: Nicholas Morton on the Crusades

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Nicholas Morton, Senior Lecturer in History, Nottingham Trent University and author of The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187, joins the show to discuss the Crusades. ▪️ Times      •      01:25 Introduction      •      02:21 What were the Crusades?     •      07:30 Franks and Turks     •     09:57 Combat     •      14:01 50/50     •      19:48 Sieges     •      23:47 Others     •      31:31 Seljuks     •      36:50 Crusader States     •      41:28 Why did they fail?     •      45:19 Continuity and complexity    •      49:45 Fluidity Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We're back to the Middle Ages today, specifically to the Crusades. But the discussion should be strikingly familiar to regular listeners, the interplay of measure and countermeasure on the battlefield, the roles of speed, of logistics, the interaction between the political, strategic level of war, and the operational level, and of course the endless complexity of the Middle East. Let's get into it.

It is the safety for war, this Milwaukee invasion of the way. December 7, 1921, 8. which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing ground, we'll fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. Mackling. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today. Nicholas Morton, who's associate professor at Nottingham Trent University in England. He is the author of numerous books. He's been on the show before to discuss the Mongols. And today we are going to discuss his book, which has just been released by Oxford University Press in paperback, The Crusaders, and their neighbors. Nicholas, thanks for joining the show. It's great to be on the show. Thanks very much. So we've done one other episode on The Crusades. It was on Jerusalem with John Hawkins. the really interesting conversation of sort of this various sieges and changes of control over Jerusalem

throughout the crusade period. But we didn't really step back too much and talk about the crusades as a complex phenomenon. You know, I haven't done an episode on the totality of it. Your book really focuses on the 1100s, essentially, the 12th century. But I thought on more than just crusaders and Franks, but also all the other various important players in the region, all that said, could we, could we start by stepping back, I think most listeners, you know, sort of point of access to this period and the region will be the Crusades. They will have some notion that there were the Crusades. But if they're like me, I don't really know much more beyond that. I've never made a study of the military history of the Crusades. What were the Crusades? What are we actually talking

about here? Okay, great. So the Crusades are a very strange phenomenon, and I've been studying them for getting on for two and a half decades and they're still a very strange phenomenon. What caused them, there's a whole series of different threads to that. One thread is that the Middle East suffers an enormous invasion from about the year 1,000 onwards as groups, as Turkic communities, nomadic communities move into Persia and then sweep west into Iraq and then ultimately by the 1070s into Syria and then advanced north into the Byzantine Empire. And in doing so, they place the Byzantine Empire, which is literally the Eastern Roman Empire, under an enormous amount of pressure. And they take a great deal of territory in Anatolia. That's what will become modern day Turkey.

And they also pose a risk to the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem. So obviously a lot of people are asking the papacy to do something about this double crisis that's taking place in the Middle East. At the same time, you've got a Pope who is very aware that the south of France, and he's from the South of France, is going through a period of intensive, low-level warfare, knightly families fighting amongst themselves, and of course that violence is seen to be deeply sinful. There's something has to be done about that. And at the same time, he knows that there is an anti-Pope looking to take power from him. So whichever combination of these factors it was and it's not clear what combination it is, he dispatches an enormous army to

the Middle East, or he calls for one, and perhaps more surprisingly, huge numbers respond to that call. And then the armies that he unleashes do something that they shouldn't have done, which is that they are militarily successful. So a bit of context here. Western European armies in this era are not particularly effective. and they're not particularly large. They don't have advanced logistics. They can't carry food for more than a week or so. They're used to fighting small-scale wars against enemies

who are probably no more than 50 or 60 miles or an equivalent away. Small armies, farming families, they can't be away from their fields and flocks for too long. So they're totally inappropriate for fighting a war well over a thousand miles away, with the intention of taking and holding Jerusalem and other cities in the Middle East, with virtually no way of then receiving additional support from Western Europe. So it really, really should have failed, but it didn't. And that then sets up an incredible phenomenon, which is that the first crusade advances into the Middle East.

It wins battle after battle against Turkish armies, and these Turkish armies, and these Turkish armies themselves are invaders into the region, having advanced out of the Central Asian step several decades previously. But the Crusaders win over and over again, and then take a series of cities in the Middle East, most notably Antioch, Edessa and Jerusalem. And they conquer Antioch and Jerusalem with a pair of very bloody massacres, which are very well known today. And on that basis, again, equally improbably, they set up. a series of states, a series of territories. Again, hundreds of miles over the sea lanes back to Italy. They really shouldn't have worked. And in fact, there's actually a Muslim author at this time called Al Salami, who says, we should be hitting them with everything we've got because they're

very few in number. They're a long way from home and they've got virtually no horses. And yet somehow this phenomenon of the Crusader states survives. And so working out from Jerusalem, Antioch, and Odessa, Crusader armies, or I'll be calling them Frankish armies from now, and that's a sort of generic term used in the Middle East or Western Europeans, they create a series of territories in the Middle East, which grow and expand over about 30 years or so, and by their height, they're amongst the most powerful territories in the region. So that's the sort of whistle-stop tour of the First Crusade and how it's set up the Crusader states. Now, that's super helpful. And you say in the book, cookie do a really, and by the way, it's, it's, it's really well written. I, I recommend a lot of books

are full of interesting and important information, but, but are actually not pleasures to read. Your, your book is both the former and the latter. Thank you. And you do a really interesting job of, of, of, outlining the remarkable ethnic and political diversity of the region, the Arab tribal control of different areas that's sort of a hangover of the Abbasid Empire. And, you know, there's a lot going on. But then you make this sort of headline point, which I thought was really intriguing, and I'm going to ask you to explain what you mean, that, you know, what really is at work here is a war between not Christians and Muslims, but Franks and Turks. What is, what do you mean by that as an organizing principle for understanding the conflict? Okay. So if we go back about 100 years before the first

crusade, as you, as you just briefly mentioned then, the entire area is the Abbasid Qaeda caliphate, which is ruled over by the Caliph in Baghdad, various different regions around that, all of which are at least technically, when the Abbasid Caliphates in decline, but they're also technically part of it. And the ruling dynasties and other parts of the Middle East are for the most part Arab dynasties or Kurdish dynasties.

But then there is this phenomenon, this massive step invasion from Central Asia, led by various Turkic groups over whom the Seljuk dynasty eventually takes control to create ultimately the Seljuk Empire. And they reach the areas where the Crusade will be operating, only about 20 years before the Crusade arrives itself. And so one of the points I'm making in my book is that this is really a conflict that's fought out in large part between two invaders. The Seljuk Turks themselves have invaded the Middle East only a few decades before the Crusaders, And they are not light and they were not gentle.

And in fact, one of the things that helps the crusaders in the early years of their conquests is the fact that there are several big rebellions against Seljuk authority by underlying populations in the Middle East because, well, why wouldn't they? The Seljuks have imposed their dominion. And actually, the Seljuks are probably, in the early years at least, seem to be the bigger threat. The Crusaders themselves are not from the region and they are not gentle, But nonetheless, the disruption caused by the First Crusade to Seljuk Authority, particularly with all the major Turkish field armies being defeated one after another,

sets up a period of disorder in the Western part of the Seljuk Empire, which lasts for long enough for the Crusader states to expand their position and entrench themselves. What was the nature of warfare here at the time of the First Crusade and then the period that follows with these established Crusader states, sort of defending themselves over the next two centuries or so. What, what, what, you know, I guess it's the same question as what did medieval warfare look like, though I suppose maybe there's some local, some, some local specifics that would be interesting to reflect on too.

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the central contentions of the book, which I think is really important, is that the nature of the warcraft and the doctrine of war, adopted by all the various factions in play in the Middle East. Now, the two biggest sort of clusters of factions are indeed the Crusader States and various Turkish dynasties. But you also have the Byzantine Empire, the Armenians. You have the Fatimid Empire in Egypt, which is a Shia-Muslim caliphate. You have the Bedouin. So there's lots of other factions in circulation as well. But ultimately, my view is that the warcraft and doctrine of all the various,

various factions involved soon develops, not just on its own basis, but to reflect and react to their principal opponents. And so, yes, it's medieval warfare, but it's not medieval warfare, as is fought in medieval Europe. Very quickly, for example, the crusader states shift their way of fighting because they're fighting very, very different opponents who aren't like them. So their principal opponents are generally Turkish dynasties, and so they fight with large formations of light cavalry archers. And that adds a major dimension, because of course they never encountered that. There's no army in Western Europe that fights that way. In Western Europe, they're agricultural armies, which means that essentially it's strong farmhands who occasionally fight,

led by aristocratic elites in chain mail and on big war horses. Now that's over-simplification, but that is the basis of it, very, very different to Turkish forces. And so the Turkish forces have to adapt to highly disciplined formations of infantry with big shields, chain mail, armour, and crossbows and spears, backed up by small but very powerful formations of heavily armoured knights. on the other side of the battle, the Franks have to adapt to very fast-moving, very mobile Turkish forces. And it's not just the tactical scenarios raised by that. It's also the logistical

ones. Frankish armies need wagon trains and they need water and they need grooms. Each warhorse needs several grooms to look after it. There's a lot of logistics and support that goes into a Frankish army, which makes it vulnerable. Turkish armies aren't the same. They will often bring flocks and herds with them. They're self-sufficient. They're also a great deal more mobile. So where a Frankish army will typically be led in sort of what to a Western eye will seem very conventional by a single commander sending out messengers and raising and lowering flags to give instructions to the various wings of the battle. The analogy I would use for Turkish armies is they operate a bit like a flock of birds in the sense that you have lots of semi-independent commanders and they all know the

broad game plan and they do respond to commands but they're also semi-autonomous and they operate collectively with only a sort of loose command structure and they will they won't line up to fight their opponent they'll circle round them they'll attack they'll pull back they may wait for a couple of days before resuming the attack but it's a very different conception of warfare to that of the Western European knights and infantry. And so both sides have to work at how to deal with the other side. Well, let's talk about that and how that iterates. This is really fascinating.

And if all I knew was what you had just described and all of the things were equal, you know, these two forces are encountering each other on flat open terrain, et cetera, et cetera, I think I would choose to be the Turks. I don't see why anyone wouldn't. Maybe you can tell me why I'm being unwise. they have mobility, they have standoff. It just seems advantageous to be that. Am I right in that inference?

And if so, what do the Crusaders do to start evolving? So viewed from the Crusaders' perspective, they can defeat the Turks. And I've done a sort of statistical analysis of pitched battles. And it's about 50-50. So both sides will. I say both sides, of course, there's multiple Turkish powers. it's not a single power block, just as the Franks themselves aren't a single power block, but they tend to win as much as they lose going both ways.

But yes, I do think ultimately that the Turkish nomadic way of war, rather like the Mongol way of war soon after it, is generally superior to that of nearly every agricultural society of this era. That includes Western Europe, but also includes agricultural societies such as the Byzantine, Empire, Muslim agricultural societies, and also China as well. So, I mean, it sounds like you, at a high level, agree with my amateur inference that the Turks have the sort of the better half of the deal here. But you just said that statistically, actually, the Franks win a lot. But we can get into this, but you talk about in the book that your research method here, which you've assembled this massive spreadsheet that accounts for every single, at least that you can find in the sources, every single encounter from skirmishes up to set peace battles and sieges.

which is fascinating. I'd love to talk about that. But how then are the Franks winning roughly 50% of the time? If my, again, my inference is correct that, gosh, you know, the Turks have mobility, they have range. I think I'd just rather be them. I don't, you know, the Franks have lack those things. It's a model that works really well, but there are things that Frankish commanders can do that enable them to win big battles. They tend to lose skirmishes and they're not as good at raiding. But big battles, It's about 50-50. So things they can do. Number one, fight in the rain. The reason being that Turkish bowstrings are made from natural products derived from their animals and they're water soluble. So they stretch or they break in the rain. So Frankish commanders fight in the rain.

Another way of doing it is this is a tactic that was used extensively throughout this period is that the Frankish armies like to fight or they like to march at night. So what they would typically do is that the day before the battle, they might be 30 or 40 miles away. And then they will very quietly dismount from their horses, lead their horses through the middle of the night, as quietly as they can, till they're within half a mile a mile of their opponents.

And then literally as soon as you can see your hand in front of your face, they charge when their opponents aren't ready for them. And in that way, small numbers of very heavily armored Crusader knights can defeat very large armies of Turkish-like cavalry. And as soon as they get into hand-to-hand combat, the Frankish up knights tend to win because their horses aren't armored, but they're very heavily armored. And Turkish mounts are often not shod. And of course, horseshoes are needed in order to carry a heavily armored rider. And so for the most part, they're much lighter, which means that. in hand-to-hand combat. In the early years at least, Turkish forces don't fare well once they get

trapped in hand-to-hand combat. Their strategy is to avoid hand-to-hand combat and to continue to harass Frankish armies with massed archery. That's their main strategy. Although this is one of the adaptations because all these armies are adapting to each other all the time. And one of the Turkish army's adaptations is to begin to develop their own formations of heavy cavalry. Incidentally, another interesting way of defeating Frankish knights, which is used a couple of times, is to fight on muddy terrain because the Frankish knights sink and the Turkish warriors don't. So again, the use of landscape and weather can be very important and indeed the hours of sunlight and darkness. So what you just outlined there, the night marches, the surprise dawn attacks, things like it.

Does that imply then that the Franks have an advantage in terms of troop handling, discipline, leadership over the Turks? Not necessarily, but the Turks themselves have very little, I mean, the Turks do fight at night sometimes, but they have very little incentive to fight at night because, of course, they depend on archery. Yeah. And so it's daylight, obviously, is a better medium for them in many respects. It's, it's that they will, when they fight at night, it's often during sieges and much

or indeed what's often the case for every army in this era is if they want to conduct a raid. They'll launch the raid in the early hours of the evening, march through the night, and then suddenly appear at first light deep in enemy territory, conduct their raid and then get out before their opponents can respond. And so another element to the strategies of every faction involved is to develop early warning systems so that they can respond to raiders fast enough to intercept them before. they can get back to their own territory laden with all the plunder they've taken. So for many of the Turkish dynasties of this era, and indeed Saladin later on, who's from a Kurdish family,

they begin to use carrier pigeons extensively because that speeds up the communications process. And also warning fires, a little bit like in, dare I say, at return of the king, they are also used because it sends a message quickly. Well, let's bring another element into this. You've mentioned sieges several times. fortifications, siege warfare are at the heart of a lot of what happens in this period. How does that help us understand how that overlays on top of everything we've been discussing so far in terms of battle and skirmishes out in the field? Okay. Let's just start with sort of the basic map of the Middle East.

They're like most societies in the medieval period. It depends a great deal on agriculture. And there's good agricultural land in the Middle East, particularly along the coastline. But nonetheless, lots of big trade routes go through the Middle East, including the silk roads from China and Central Asia and the spice routes from Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, then going up the Persian Gulf and then into Syria and into the coastal region where the Crusader states are. And I'm mentioning this because with so much trade passing through the region, the cities get really big. and so places like Damascus, Aleppo, Acre, not Jerusalem, actually, Jerusalem's a very small city, but in Egypt, Alexandria, Cairo, Damietta, these are big cities. And because they command so much of the trade and because there's such a large population,

they become the lynch pins of power. So if you hold these big cities, you hold a great deal of power. And that is really the way in which the warfare in the Middle East takes place. It's all about long-term game plans for conquest or control, I should say, over these big cities. So sieges are essential. And the Frankish armies, their preferred siege tactic, is to use siege towers. So huge, great, wooden mobile towers. And the idea is you build them, roll them up against the enemy battlements,

and then in you go, and then you've conquered another city. Turkish strategies are very, very different. Turkish commanders generally prefer undermining. And so what Turkish commanders do is that they will send out tens of thousands, or however many they've got, of archers. And the arches are there just to maintain a steady bombardment onto the opposing city or castle's battlements. And they're not expecting to win anything with those arches,

and the casualty rate among those arches will be significant. but all they're trying to do is get to a point where they've exhausted the defender's ammunition or at least they've forced them to keep their head down and then the miners go in and the miners dig underneath the walls. They don't want to collapse the walls immediately. They want to prop the walls up with big balks of timber until they've propped up a whole length of the wall and then they fire the mine, burn the timber, the timber collapses,

the wall collapses on top of it and then the assault troops go in. and so it's very different ways of conducting sieges. It's not always that way, but that's the most common way of doing it. And again, it has to be said that the Turkish approach to sieges is typically more effective. And there's several reasons of that. You can undermine a wall and bring the wall down in a few days. There are certain examples, for example, in 1187, Saladin manages to bring down the wall of the town of Tai B, in a single night. Whereas if you want to build a siege tower, well, first of all, you've got to find

the timber. And the Middle East, unlike the oak forests of Western Europe, isn't quite so timber rich. There's some good trees, but often acquiring the timber for the big cornerposts of a siege tower is very difficult. And even if you do, it'll take you several weeks to build a siege tower and then you've got to flatten the land to advance it against the walls. Siege towers take a few months to complete sieges if they are successful. So it's slower. And that means that where, for example, Saladin siege tactics or Turkish siege tactics could get into a city in a few days, a couple of weeks maximum,

it would take a few months for a Frankish army, which is probably too long because a refurb will have arrived before that point. So if this is principally a contest between Western Europeans on the one hand and Turks on the other, how does everyone else figure in? That is to say, I think in the Western imagination, you know, from sort of child encyclopedia level understanding of the period, it's the Franks or the Western Europeans on the one side and sort of the locals on the other. It strikes me that the situation is more complex in reality. How do the Franks work with locals, which locals tend to their side? How do the Arab tribes figure? Just help us understand the complexity of this at a political level. So in some ways, I've been a little bit oversimplified by reducing it to simply Franks and Turks.

As you quite rightly point out, there are other factions involved as well. And there are underlying populations who have a stake in all what's going on as well. The Fatimid Empire in Egypt is, as I mentioned, it's a sheer Muslim. Islam Empire and it has a very different form of army. Egypt is by far and away the wealthiest part of the Middle East so they can afford to hire their warriors. So they hire large formations of Sudanese, light infantry, Berber cavalry, Armenian archers and some Turkish light archers as well, as well as other Arab cavalry in addition. So they have various different ethnic contingents which together create their armies. And they're very large.

and very well-equipped armies, but they perform very poorly on the battlefield in this era, either against Frankish armies or against the armies of the Seljuk Empire and its satellites. And then you have the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine sets stage several campaigns into the Middle East, and they're similar in some ways to the Fatimid Empire, in that they have formations of East Roman or Byzantine or Greek troops, depending on what you want to call them. but they also have formations of other troops drawn from other ethnic groups,

such as the Petchenegs, who are a Turkic community who live to the north of the Byzantine Empire. They've got formations of Western mercenaries. And they've also got the Varangian Guard, who famously are Viking warriors or warriors from the North Sea region, who have a very fearsome reputation and become the elite formation in the Byzantine Army. And Byzantine armies are fairly effective. What diminishes their impact in the region around the Crusader States is that frequently by the time they get to the area,

there's normally a fair amount of pressures for them to go back and deal with something else. So their time in theatre, I suppose if you were to put it, is often fairly slight. In addition to that, you have Armenian societies as the Kingdom of Silician, Armenia, which is what today would be modern day, northern Syria, southern, more southern Turkey, really. And they're famous for their strongholds and castles. They build a lot of very substantial strongholds. And I've often wondered or, and indeed there's several sort of bits of evidence coming out at the moment that imply a strong Armenian influence on some of the Crusader castles built in this era. And then there are other forces. The Bedouin often fight with the Franks,

and the way I explain that, we don't really have anyone who says why the Bedouin fight so closely with the Crusader States on the same side. I've often wondered if it's because the incoming Turkish communities were nomadic and therefore required grazing, whether the Bedouin therefore saw them as a threat to their own grazing

and that then incentivised them to fight on the side of the Crusader states, but there's quite a lot of cooperation there. And it has to be said that the reasons for war are various. There's migration that changes a great deal. There is holy war, but there's also individual ambitions and rivalries and disputes, both among the Franks and indeed among all the other groups in the Middle East as well. And so it's frequently the case that you have Muslim and Christian or Frankish and Turkish or all sorts of other combinations of alliances of formations on the same side,

fighting another coalition made up again, perhaps of Frankish or Eastern Christian or other groups from the Middle East. So often the battle lines are complex. It's frequently said that this is a period which witnesses a clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam. It's actually a lot more complicated. There is an underlying religious conflict. There's a lot of other things going on as well. No, it's dizzying and not much seems to have changed as far as the region is concerned. remember as a graduate student reading for the first time to you Lawrence's seven pillars of wisdom and i you know i didn't know much about the middle east there's sort of starting my my thinking about that part of the world and there's a marvelous i don't know if it's the introduction the prolog or whatever it is

but Lawrence starts the book with this kind of bird's eye travel up from Arabia into the Levant up the coast and he's sort of naming and describing in this beautiful prose the different communities and ethnicities and religious affiliations. And I remember being, and age of 20 or 21 or whatever, sort of being blown away. I thought, I thought it was Muslims and Christians and Jews.

I thought this was more straightforward. It's not straightforward at all. It's incredibly, incredibly complicated. It is. It's such a network of different communities, but in many ways, for me, that's what makes it so fascinating.

Because you have these interactions. You have societies from the Central Asian step, the Seljuk Turks, later on the Mongols. You have interactions with people from Western Europe, via the Crusades or through traders or cop or merchants from Venice or Genoa or somewhere like that. You have interactions with sub-Saharan Africa through the troops recruited by the Fatimid Empire or indeed from traders coming up from Marley and Nigeria bringing particularly gold, which is the most sort of important trade good or from the Indian Ocean where you've got the spicy.

traders bringing goods from Egypt. And it's all happening in a small area. All these interactions from across Eurasia and Africa happening in a small area. And so many things are being exchanged. Ideas, technologies, recipes, stories and indeed military tactics and weapons. And so there's a lot of technological change taking place in this era, both with technologies being brought in from strange and foreign lands like Western Europe, or indeed being devised as commanders from these different societies encounter one another and then clearly sit down and have to work out how on earth they're going to deal with weapons and tactics they've never encountered before. So you talked about Franco-Arab or Franco-Beduan cooperation as a sort of interesting phenomenon.

Can we ask how the Turks, whether the Seljuks or other groupings, How did they adjust? I mean, they sort of burst out of the step, what, 100 years before this, 50 years before the First Crusade, something like that? And they are, as, you know, the Arabs did before them or the Mongols will do after them, the sort of acclimatizing to agricultural life and more sedentary or urban lifestyle of the Lavant or the Fertile Crescent or however we want to talk about it. How do they adjust?

How do they establish themselves? Obviously, their form of warfare as the Crusades began. and still owes a lot to how they were operating out on the grasslands. Help us understand that process. Yeah, sure. So in some respects, they don't have to adjust because large formations of mounted archers prove decisive on Eurasian battlefield still the 17th century. But even so, that's not to say that they are in any way complacent, and they do devise

lots of new strategies and tactics based on the people they encounter. And so, as I mentioned, many Turkish dynasties and indeed the Ayubid dynasty, that's Saladin's dynasty, they develop large formations of heavy cavalry because they can see qualities they like in the Crusader Knights. And so they begin to develop their own equivalent. And I might note that equally, just as Turkish commanders are developing heavy cavalry, so the Crusader states themselves are employing large numbers of, Turkish like cavalry archers? Because again, why wouldn't they? If it works to their opponent, why shouldn't it work for them? So there is a great deal of learning taking place. I've mentioned early warning systems. That's fairly important as well. But there's the changing nature of warfare too, because over time, certain parts of the various Turkish communities do adapt to an

agricultural lifestyle or a more urban lifestyle and so they can afford better weapons and armor, all of which brings about changes. And of course, they're tackling castles. And there's been some fabulous work done on siege tactics, which basically shows that the nature of castles and fortifications is continually in dialogue with siege tactics, because as a new tactic is devised, a new response is devised by architect working out how to deal with these things.

So, for example, as some recent studies have shown, Crusader Castle start with fairly thin walls and then as the 12th century develops the walls get a lot thicker to deter undermining and then at the bottom of the wall you get the advent of a glacis which is where the wall spreads out at the bottom to get a much wider base again to prevent undermining there are sally ports at regular intervals

so that people can sneak out in the middle of the night and disrupt mining activities and where in Western Europe you might see castles with an occasional arrow slit every now and again. Crucetta castles have arrow slits about every few feet. And so you should visualize entire galleries of arrow slits, each serviced by three or four crossbowmen, one shoots, steps away to reload. The next one steps in and shoots, and they're doing that in a cycle, because they realize how damaging it is when that initial archery barrage begins.

if they can't suppress that archery barrage, the miners are going to get to the bottom of the wall. So all of these stratageons are devised to combat the tactics of their opponents. And so just as the Franks are doing that with their castle design, so Turkish and Kurdish commanders are devising new approaches for getting into Frankish castles faster. So it's a dialogue, it's a conversation. And so it's a little bit like, I don't know, the example that comes to mind is the Second World War, really. One side brings in one particular new weapon or new approach or new strategy. The other side has to adapt immediately, except that in this arena, if you like, there are

multiple factions all adapting simultaneously. And there's a great book by someone called Michael Fulton. And he looks at catapult technology. It's in this period that the counterweight trebushet is developed. and this is the catapult where you've got a massive great weight that's dropped, throwing up the throwing arm and hurling a big old rock at an opponent's castle. And a point that's fairly clear is that these sorts of catapults were devised not only during and as a response to the wars of this era,

but they were devised almost simultaneously. They appear almost at the same time in Frankish and IUBids, that Saladin's dynasty, in the armies of that time. And part of the reason for this is that siege engineers, this is my explanation anyway, siege engineers in this era, they're mobile. They travel from place to place. When one ruler goes to war, the ruler hires them. And then when that war is over, another ruler hires them. So siege engineers will crisscross the Middle East looking for work. And of course, they're bringing their ideas with them. And so as soon as one faction developed something, all the factions have got that new technology because the people, who designed them are hireable. Yeah, that's all really interesting. I'm particularly struck by somebody who is undermined and men undermined many times in my professional life.

I'm struck that the origin of the term is in medieval siege warfare. Didn't know that before getting ready for this episode. Here's a sort of an unfair question given we're talking about 200 years or so of history here for the core crusading period. But we've been talking mostly thematically so far. Could you give listeners just kind of a quick periodization, you know, just sort of a quick periodization, just a few minutes to help them organize in their minds. Like what happens here?

What are the major phase lines of this period, chronologically speaking? So the first crusade happens. And to everyone's surprise, militarily it's successful, it establishes at least the origins of three crusade estates based around the cities of Jerusalem, Antioch and Odessa. And a few years later, the Franks conquer Tripoli, which creates the fourth crusade estates. After that, for about the next 20 years until the mid-1120s,

the Quetian estates expands significantly and very rapidly. And what facilitates that is there is enormous infighting within the Seljuk Sultanate. And so the Seljuk Turks and their various satellite dynasties aren't able to concentrate on the Quetida states. They have many threats on many frontiers, and they're fighting amongst themselves. So that creates a sort of a vacuum which, the Franks can exploit. As the 12th century progresses, so we're now into 1130s, 1140s, 1150s,

the implosion of the Seljuk Sultanate continues and various other Turkish dynasties begin to take control across its various districts. And the most powerful of these facing the Christian Estates is called the Zangid dynasty, which is founded by a very capable warrior and commander called Zanghi, who creates a large empire in northern Syria and the Jazeera. So that's the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And he poses an existential threat to the northern crusader states and defeats one of the crusaders states called the County of Odessa in 1144 to 1150. Zenghi dies and is replaced by his son called Nuraldin.

Nour al-Din continues to fight wars against the Franks. but also against many other opponents as well. So it's very rarely as simple as just being sort of Franks against Nuraldinner, the battle lines being drawn by religion. But that is take a big step forward in the 1160s. And in the 1160s, it becomes clear that the Fatimid Empire, which has been struggling for a long time, the Fatimperian Empire controlling Egypt,

is ripe for conquest, essentially. And this becomes clear when civil, war in Egypt causes the various combatant parties to reach out for assistance, some to Noir al-Din in Syria and some to the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Crusader States. And so both Nour al-Din and the Crusader States send armies into Egypt, creating a three-sided conflict between the Fatimid factions, Noural-Din and the Crusader States. And in a very convoluted series of wars, Nuraldin ultimately wins. And the commander who wins in Noreldin's name is a commander called Shurka. And Shurka is significant, partly because he conquered Egypt, but also because his nephew took power

after him, and his nephew's name was Saladin, or Salah Hadin, I should say. So Saladin then starts his career in newly conquered Egypt, and then a few years later his master Nouraldin dies. Saladin spends the next a little over a decade, conquering his master's empire. So he spends much of his time fighting against his former master to conquer territories in Syria. But then by the 1180s, Selden's built a massive empire for himself in Syria, the Jazeera, and his origin spot in Egypt. And with that combined force, he's then able to invade and defeat the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem following which he conquers, or reconquers Jerusalem in October 1187.

And it's that event, that sort of vital and crucial event in world history that is the end of my book, although of course it will then lead on to the enormous response from Western Europe to Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem, which is the third crusade led by famously people like Richard I of England or Frederick I of Germany and Philip the second of France. You spend a fair amount of time in your book analyzing the reasons for the ultimate defeat of the Crusaders as the decades go on. Walk us through that now.

Why, why after they meet with surprising success up front? They secure a series of communities, of states for themselves. Why don't they hold on in the end? Sure. So I'm frequently asked, could the Crusader States ever have survived? And of course, it's a bit of an unhistoric question because it involves speculation we can never know. And in fact, I've actually written one article on one occasion saying it possibly could have survived. And one article will say it probably couldn't have.

Which is goes to show how undecided I am. But I think the main thing to be aware of is the reason for the initial success of the First Crusade and the expansion of the Crusade Estates, or part of the reason anyway, is that. the Seljuk Empire, so the Turkish Empire, which spans from the borders of the Central Asian step all the way across to Syria, is embroiled in a massive civil war. And that takes their eye off what's going on in the Crusader States. And it's not just the Crusader States they're worried about. They're also worried about the Fatimids, the Byzantines, the Armenians, and indeed future waves of invasions out of the Central Asian step. So they've got lots of things to worry about, the crusader states are just one of them. And in that environment, the crusader

states can prosper. But as these new dynasties rise, the Zangids in Syria, later on the Ayubids, then resistance begins to consolidate. And as resistance consolidates, the natural strengths and advantages of the nomadic, or I call it the hybrid nomadic and agricultural way of war, because by this stage the various Turkish dynasties, yes, they're still fighting with like cavalry archers like their forefathers did in the Central Asian steppe, but they have adapted to an extent to agricultural practices as well. Their natural advantages begin to show.

And I think it's a little bit simplistic, but in many ways those advantages can be reduced to a single word, and that single word is speed. The armies of the Seljuks, the Zangids, the Ayubids, they all fight the same way, like cavalry archers with a mix of heavy cavalry. They're faster. They can raid faster, get out faster. If they're defeated, they can withdraw faster. If they're victorious, they can follow up on their victories faster. Whereas the Frankish armies, most of whom are on foot, if they're defeated, they get slaughtered because they're on foot and they're being chased down by light cavalry. If they're victorious, they can plod towards an enemy town if they want, but the chances are that their opponent will have regrouped and be reattacking them before they've got very fast.

So even in victory, there's not much for them to gain. And then in siege warfare, again, it's often the Zangids or the Iubids who prove to be faster. They can get inside the walls quicker than the Franks with their siege towers. So a lot of this comes down to speed. and in nearly every scenario, it's the Turkish template armies that are faster. They move faster, they react faster, they're faster in the battlefield, they get into cities faster. In combat, it can be one or lost either way. And the Franks do have adaptations.

I mentioned like marching, for example. But ultimately, those adaptations aren't enough to tip the balance. So we've been talking about a region this entire time that, of course, is it war as we speak? And we've done numerous episodes on the show talking about the ongoing multi-front war that Israel is fighting. I mean, ultimately against Iran. So there's, you know, there's some echoes, obvious echoes from the crusader period to the period of the present. Do you ever reflect in the course of your work about continuities between your period and the present day? A lot of military officers listen to this show.

We're obviously paying attention to the region. Some of them are in the region? You know, what are your thoughts, if any, on what does this all mean for 2020? for it. On one hand, I have to start any answer by pointing out that this is not my expertise. And so I can throw out some ideas, but there are people who are way more qualified and experienced, knowledgeable about this than I am. And obviously what's going on and the end of cycles of conflict is tragic at the moment. But I think for anyone trying to understand the Middle East, the one thing I think I can safely say is this. And that is never,

fall into the trap of thinking it's simple and never fall to the trap of thinking that the reasons for conflict are simple. There are, and I think it's safe to say there still are, so many different motives and objectives and different communities and faith communities and ethnic communities, all of whom are in play simultaneously. And within pretty much any community, there are various smaller communities that men are components of them. And any attempt to, understand what's going on in the Middle East, then or now, requires understanding the complexity of those relationships, how people interact with each other, and then adding the additional level of complexity that, of course, the Middle East is not an island. Pretty much every single region

surrounding the Middle East has a stake in what's going on, has an interest, and intervenes in some way, shape, or form. And so those interests have to be involved as well. So I think that Any attempt to understand what's going on in the Middle East requires embracing considerable layers of complexity and being ready to listen way more. Listening is so important. It's listening to what people are saying and taking them seriously when they say it. Understanding what they're trying to achieve and how they're trying to achieve it, not presuming anything. and then try to understand how that creates a network of interconnections, and then perhaps you're a starting point for getting to grips with it all. And it's not just the layers of the different communities and the religions

and the different families and interests involved. It also has to be pointed out that all of this is taking place over an enormously historic region. There are battles and disputes and arguments taking place within a few hundred metres of Phoenician ruins or Roman ruins or Greek ruins or ruins from the period of early Islam or ruins from the period of the Seljupt Turks or Crusader castles or Armenian castles or I could the list is virtually endless but I think it's it's not a very complex point to make but the point itself is complexity really yeah but I think it's a wise one I remember thinking as I was leaving in Afghanistan after a normal Marine Corps length of time there, that I would sort of flatter myself

and say, I understood about 5% maybe of the political dynamics of my little neighborhood, my district. I mean, who hated whom and who loved whom. There was more of the former than the latter. And why, you know, maybe 5% after seven months on the ground. No, there were a couple of things, I mean, a couple of things you said are themes of the show, really. Your point about adaptation and innovation in the face of, you know, the measure, countermeasure dynamic is a theme of the show and it's obviously a theme of warfare.

I mean, it's a pattern that to understand warfare requires understanding that process. And I think you made a really interesting point that how it's not just binary. It's not measure and countermeasure, but there are many parties sort of evolving simultaneously along similar lines. I'm not even sure how you would represent that visually. And then the other point you made towards the end, which I thought was really interesting, was that Crusaders are ultimately, they're successful out of the gate because they exploit. at a political, strategic level, a very unstable, faltering situation, which allows their operationally somewhat inferior way of fighting to succeed. And then as the balance of power

is restored in a way that's unfavorable to them, the sort of operationally somewhat superior methods of their adversaries, then finally are able to assert themselves. And this process occurs over the course of what, 200 years, gradually? It's a long process, yeah. I think another reflection I've got that people interested in military history or military events, I keep coming back to it in my mind. I haven't quite sort of crystallised it, but it's in modern day warfare, we talk about systems where everything, where all the various aspects of the battles are interconnected, generally online or though through other connections as well.

And you've got logistics bases and you've got transit spaces and you've got trucks and you've got ships and you've got planes and they all work together as a sort of as a sort of system. I think that one of the things that the period I'm studying really brings out, it's a quality that my instinct is I don't see it quite as much in sort of modern approaches to warfare, certainly warfare on a large scale. And that's fluidity. So much of the warfare that I've studied when looking at the Seljuk Turks or the Mongols. They're incredibly self-sufficient. They're incredibly fluid. They move very easily. Their systems are fairly simple, but they're incredibly effective. And it's that ability to be mobile and self-sufficient to operate in a chaotic zone where you

simply can't establish routine channels for reinforcements or supplies or whatever else it may be. it's that fluidity in a chaotic landscape that seems to win, and it wins over and over again in the medieval period. And I haven't quite crystallized where I'm going with that, but it's something that I do think about. No, it's fascinating. I remember talking with you when we talked about the Mongols, about how the Mongols were also a fascination of John Boyd, a sort of controversial American theorist, and I think he would have enthusiastically participated in this conversation about fluidity with you. Well, when you crystallize it a bit more, let us know, because I would love to go into that with you. But Nicholas Morton, Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University and author most recently of what we've been talking about today, the Crusader States and their neighbors, the military history, 1099, 1187.

This is really, really interesting, Nick. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you so much. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.