Crusader Strategy? Do Fish Need Bicycles?

It is easy to see medieval warfare and politics as being long on activity, but chronically short on reflection. To misquote the 1970s feminist rallying cry, it is pretty obvious that hairy, unwashed medieval warriors needed strategy every bit as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Or at least that is what we assume.

 Even the title of this book, The Crusader Strategy, seems a contradiction in terms. Contemporary chronicles, and most modern narrative accounts of medieval history, read more like a soap opera than a strategic planning document. Kings are crowned and die. Armies invade and fight. The warrior elite have their moments of glory or disappointment, a stream of entitled celebrities wandering across the stage of history with chroniclers as their paparazzi.

 The narrative flow in the chronicles is a succession of events. Human nature and the will of God, luck, opportunity and reaction, these are the unspoken drivers of politics and warfare in most histories of the period. Not entirely aimless perhaps, but implicitly lacking in what we would now describe as any form of strategic direction. 

Ridicule and mockery are our default approach to the (obviously absurd) idea of medieval ‘rationality’. But the current caricature of the crusaders is arguably even worse. Given unhelpful fresh impetus by recent rhetoric from both Western politicians and their Islamic opponents, they are often viewed as backward, inherently bigoted societies - alien armies of occupation, with the crude and sclerotic strategic, political and military systems that one would anticipate under such circumstances. These were, so the crude over-simplification goes, societies permanently out of their depth and continually struggling in the face of ethnic and cultural isolation.

 The military corollary of this would inevitably be a style of warfare which reflected this social dislocation and lack of strategic insight: arrogant, irrational and impulsive leaders; isolated garrisons in oppressive castles; crude and brutish heavy cavalry charges as a substitute for any real finesse; and being permanently outnumbered because of their ignorant treatment of the local population. How could one imagine that such societies, and such backward military establishments, would ever be capable of developing ‘strategy’ in any meaningful sense of the word?

 This is lazy and patronising thinking, however, and potentially very misleading. We believe we are good at strategy because we use the word a lot. Modern governments, their generals and their PR teams all talk a lot about ‘strategy’ but that strategy is often far harder to discern in the activities that take place on the ground. Talk is cheap. Actions are always more powerful and far more telling. 

In the crusader states, on the contrary, where the resources and structures for planning and communication were in chronically short supply, there was far less talk of strategy. If we care to look for it, however, it is surprisingly evident in the activities of most of the major players. We find this evidence through examining underlying rationality, deconstructing actions on the ground, and establishing patterns of behaviour.

 First, we need to accept that the major participants were not all idiots - and why should they have been? Some were, of course, but most were reasonable, highly motivated people, surrounded by well-informed advisers. They were intelligent people trying to do the right thing for their families, their colleagues, their states and their God. The corollary of this is the assumption that while not all their ideas or plans were good ones, one should give them the benefit of the doubt in terms of underlying rationality, at least until proven otherwise.

 Secondly, by deconstructing the actions that took place on the ground, we can arrive at a far more realistic assessment of what was actually intended. What we do is always a far better indicator of intent than what we say, or the propaganda we choose to project.

 And lastly, working back from that, we can examine the patterns of real behaviour as they played out over time, and deduce, with appropriate caveats, the broad lines of strategic thinking that underpinned military and political activity.

 We have the potential to identify an unarticulated or unidentified strategy by examining known patterns of activity. We can extrapolate back from that point to deduce the underlying strategic intent, and the extent to which that intent remained constant over significant periods of time. We know what the crusaders and their opponents did (campaigns, battles, and so on) and we also know the relatively simple range of levers that they had at their disposal to implement their activities (such as siegecraft, colonisation, or castle building). By deconstructing these two strands of actuality, we can come close to deducing the underlying (and often unspoken) strategic intent.

There are no surviving ‘strategy’ documents, no memos or irritating Friday afternoon meeting notes from the crusader states. Probably, in the modern sense at least, there were never any formal strategy documents in the first place. But there is an abundance of evidence to show that planning took place and that the development of long-term strategies was a direct consequence of those plans.

Although they did not have the vocabulary to describe it as such, ‘strategic thinking’ was an essential part of the crusaders’ day-to-day survival kit.