Steve Tribble
The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land
(Yale, 2020), 376 pp. $35.00
Steve Tibble opens this book at the end of the story and in the midst of action, specifically the skirmish at the Springs of Cresson in 1187. Gerard de Rideford, the Master of the Templars, led a cavalry charge with a hundred and some knights against a much larger Ayyubid force. The Templar master was badly wounded, the master of the Hospital was killed, and the knights were wiped out. This suicidal charge sets up the main topics that Tibble discusses in this book: whether the crusaders had any sort of capacity to engage in military planning and the power disparity between the Latins and their enemies. The skirmish at the Springs of Cresson is here set up as an archetypal, irrational decision by Gerard that resulted in his men getting killed and no one learning any lessons prior to the Battle of Hattin two months later. Yet, as Tibble goes on to argue, the story is more complicated. The Master of the Hospital had argued against making the charge, and in any case cavalry charges against long odds did have a remarkably good record amongst the crusaders. Tibble uses the debate and ensuing crusader defeat to posit that crusader warfare was not all suicidal attacks against impossible odds, but rather a series of coherent, reasonable decisions made over the long term against increasingly long odds.
Tibble labels this strategy and argues that limited resources forced the crusaders to engage in complicated military decision making. The discussion of the definition of strategy is mercifully brief. Tibble notes that the term has been used so generally and applied to any semblance of planning that it has little meaning. His definition of strategy is warfare that takes place beyond the battlefield, effectively, state policy and objectives. To determine the strategy of the crusader states, Tibble argues that it can be seen in what was done. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem produced no white papers articulating their strategies, but that does not mean that it is impossible to deduce how the crusaders viewed their strategic situation. Their actions speak volumes, Tibble plausibly suggests, in that they consistently pursued a series of objectives intended to preserve and secure their states. Through the examination of their military activities on a year-by-year basis as well as their diplomatic efforts, it can be seen that the crusaders engaged in long-term planning in pursuit of consistent goals.
The first two chapters set the stage and lay out the definitions. Six chapters follow, each of which discuss strategy in a different time and place. The first of these (chapter 3) is on how the crusaders managed the coast. The arguments here are fairly familiar: far from Europe, control of the sea-lanes was the only way to communicate with back home. However, Fatimid Egypt had a substantial navy which they employed to maintain control over coastal towns like Arsuf, Acre, and Tyre that otherwise had their hinterlands reduced by the crusader states. The crusaders had limited naval power, and thus needed the help of the Italian maritime republics. The ongoing efforts made by the crusaders to capture these coastal towns show a consistent strategy, but Tibble strengthens his argument here by discussing logistics. First, an element of inertia was present for the Fatimids, as with every port they lost it became increasingly difficult to provide freshwater for the crews of their warships. This reduced their range and made it more difficult for them to defend the next port city the crusaders attacked. The second major point is that while the histories and chronicles refer to Italian fleets suddenly appearing to aid besieging crusader land forces, the reality is rather that it could take years to put these expeditions together and that they were coordinated well in advance. Far from picking a port city to attack at the beginning of the campaigning season, the crusaders were engaging in long-range diplomacy and military coordination on a multi-year timescale.
The next chapter turns to the interior hinterland. The questions that Tibble sees the crusaders as facing are what could be taken? and what could be held? Aleppo, Shaizar, Damascus, and Banyas emerged as the main threats to the crusaders and consequently became the main targets. Like along the coast, however, Frankish siegecraft proved not to be up to the task. The only real success was Edessa in 1098. It had no defensible borders but was a wealthy place able to support nearly as many knights as Jerusalem, and thus showed what could be done when the hinterland was taken. Ultimately, Tibble concludes that the crusaders’ decision to attack these hinterland sites was strategically sound, even if their resources were insufficient to capture them.
A short chapter then focuses on Ascalon from 1125-53. A major Fatimid city, it posed a threat to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Since taking it had proved unsuccessful, the crusader strategy set about hemming it in with distant fortifications. The strategy that Tibble identifies with this is an attempt to free up resources so the kings of Jerusalem could campaign elsewhere while under less threat from Ascalon. This was complete in 1150 when crusader Gaza severed Ascalon’s overland supply lines back to Egypt, and three years later it finally fell to crusader forces.
The next strategy that Tibble sets out to deal with is that of the interior of the crusader states. He notes that most fortifications were constructed in the interior of the crusader states than on the frontiers. Tibble spends much of this chapter noting that although the crusaders ruled over a large Muslim and eastern Christian population, there is little evidence that most had any sort of political programme and so the risk was not of revolt. Rather the military forces were there to contain banditry.
Next comes the strategy in dealing with Egypt in the middle of the twelfth century (1154-69). The crusaders knew that they needed Egypt, as they simply had too few fiefs to offer when attempting to attract help from Europe. Egypt was large and wealthy, and although Baldwin III and Amalric had some success in fighting the Fatimids, they simply lacked the resources to take it over. By the late 1160s political turbulence had strengthened Nur al-Din’s hand in Egypt, imperiling the crusaders even further. Another major campaign with Byzantine help was probably in the planning for the mid-1170s but it never came to pass due to Amalric’s death in 1174. Again, Tibble concludes that the crusader strategy in taking Egypt was the right decision, but they lacked the resources to carry it out. By this point, however, the imbalance of resources had made such a breakthrough all the more critical, as Nur al-Din’s increasingly powerful state had tipped things against the crusaders.
The final strategy chapter is about the frontier, 1170-87. It is here that the military orders and castle building becomes increasingly important as the crusaders were unable to take the fight to their enemies. Tibble argues that the castle-building must have been carried out in some systematic fashion despite the lack of direct evidence for this, as all the crusader states made similar developments at the same time. The siege of Jacob’s Ford is central to this discussion, showing that the Ayyubids had an understanding of the danger that concentric castles could pose and so made an effort to prevent them from being built. The strategy here is that the crusaders had no other choice: they could not face their enemies on the field and needed to hold on until the situation improved. The political winds could have blown another way: the consolidation of the Ayyubids was not guaranteed, and Saladin’s campaign against Jerusalem in 1177 had shown that the crusaders could still win battles. However, sitting in a castle while the enemy ranged about did not sit well with the martial culture of Latin knighthood, and this brings us back to the Springs of Cresson and Hattin in 1187. This chapter also serves as a useful companion piece to the chapter on castle-building in Tibble’s 2018 The Crusader Armies, with the other book describing the innovations in military architecture in greater detail and The Crusader Strategy discussing how the castles functioned in practice.
The audience is explicitly said to be popular but the book contains sufficiently detailed notes which make it useful to the scholar. The book has much useful supporting material, with 18 figures, 12 maps, and a number of chronological lists appended to the main chapters (and unfortunately, not listed separately in the table of contents). While Tibble’s main point seems to be to get across to a general audience that medieval people were capable of reasoning and long-term planning on a state level, scholars will find the sheer amount of evidence assembled here to be a valuable vindication of this. The definition of strategy (were they capable of pursuing long-term goals that served the interest of the crusader states?) is kept refreshingly simple and is convincingly answered in the affirmative.
Lucas McMahon
Princeton University
