God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman Read Free Book Online

in the Jazira beyond the Euphrates before assuming the crown of Jerusalem; the Kurdish mercenary captain Yusuf Ibn Ayyub (d. 1193) became Sultan of the Near East: he is better known as Saladin.
    The increasing prominence given such men can be charted in their cultural profile. By the twelfth century across western Europe, lords and even kings were for the first time depicting themselves on their personal seals as mounted warriors, knights, no longer an image of mere soldiery but of social status. The image of the armed knight, in wax, painting, sculpture, stained glass, poetry and funerary effigies,became the standard iconic representation of the ruling military aristocracy. In Byzantium, not only were the martial qualities of Alexius I emphasized by eulogists and artists, but much attention and admiration was directed at the fighting characteristics of the hired mercenaries on which the empire depended, Turks, Slavs and western Europeans. In the Near East, political propaganda caught up with political reality. A political system that relied on hiring paid private armies unsurprisingly revived the theory of holy war, jihad , to which any ambitious leader had to aspire. A succession of ambitious parvenu rulers, culminating but not ending with Saladin, laid claim to the accolade of mujahid , holy warrior.
    One obvious practical reason underpinned such respect for the fighting man. The well-trained mounted fighter, even in small numbers, could dominate any battlefield and provide a decisive outcome usually in a modest period of time relative to the static slugging matches of massed, opposing, poorly armed infantry. In the Near East, these cavalrymen would be lightly armoured, using small horses, with the shorter bow as their main offensive weapon. The rapid attack, feint and ambush were their methods. In the west, archers tended to be infantry and, although useful in sieges and to control the tempo of a field battle, until the development of the great longbow were not the arbiters of victory or defeat. The western armed knight was the tank of the period; manoeuvrable; impervious to most of the fire power available to the opposing infantry. Arrows from short bows usually stuck irritatingly but harmlessly into the chain-mail coats worn over leather hauberks or tunics, so that during a long struggle knights were seen to resemble giant hedgehogs. Many famous knightly casualties to arrows came when the missile found an exposed, unprotected part of the anatomy, such as the eye or, most often, the neck when heat forced the mailed warrior to loosen his mailed neck-guard. With plate armour, arrows, even from the later longbows, tended to glance off carefully moulded front surfaces. While direct hits from spears and lances were a threat, the best chain-mail and plate armour were remarkably effective at deflecting sword-thrusts. The main use of swords, spears and maces against mounted knights was to unseat them; without the height and horse advantage, the armoured warrior became vulnerable.
    Through genetics, training and diet, knights tended to be physically bigger than infantry. Mounted on increasingly well-bred, speciallytrained and larger horses, protected by armour and wielding heavy lances, maces and swords, a few knights could hold their own against scores of infantry. The repeated accounts of seemingly miraculous victories or escapes by hopelessly outnumbered bands of knights, while likely to be exaggerated, preserved a truth. Knightly losses in battle were modest except through the massacres that often ensued at the end of fighting. In the massed charge, lances fixed (or ‘couched’) or with swords and maces, western knights presented a most potent weapon. This depended for its effectiveness on the use of shielding ranks of infantry to commit the enemy so far as to prevent his withdrawal, escape or, as when faced with Near Eastern armies, feints and strong field discipline, to prevent a precipitate or piecemeal attack. The