Название: The Crusades Uncovered
Автор: Adrian Boas
Издательство: Arc Humanities Press
Год: 2022
Страниц: 112
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

Adrian Boas, an archaeologist with four decades' experience in the field, takes a fresh approach to investigating the experiences of crusaders, pilgrims, and settlers in the crusader states during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The book opens up the experience of medieval travel and crusading by drawing on personal reflection and comparison with contemporary events. Topics covered include wonderment at the strangeness of the East, adjusting to life in the Levant, the horrors of warfare, the drama of fortress and battlefield, and the theatrical beauty of religious architecture, together with new perceptions of a selection of characters known and less-known. The book encourages the reader to think more deeply as to the meaning of the topics involved.

During the First Crusade, when, after a prolonged siege the crusader army occupied the city of Antioch, the Christians in turn found themselves besieged by a vast Muslim army under the leadership of Kherboga, the governor of Mosul. Fear and fatalism descended on the crusader camp, but with the miraculous discovery, in one of the city churches, of what was claimed to be the Holy Lance (the lance that pierced Jesus on the cross) the crusaders regained their conviction that God was on their side. With renewed courage they attacked the besieging enemy, and then something even more remarkable occurred.

We tend to think of crusader battles as having generally taken place on dry land, and this is by-and-large true, although there was active participation of the Italian fleets in transporting crusaders East, in the sieges of the coastal towns during the first decades of the twelfth century, in the siege of Constantinople in 1204 and in sieges of Damietta on the Nile in 1218–1219 and 1249. But naval victories are less likely to come to mind when we contemplate the crusades, and not everyone is aware that ships played a decisive role in the 1099 conquest of Jerusalem. In a manner of speaking, the crusader conquest of Jerusalem might be regarded as a naval victory, even though, like another famous battle, the Battle of Midway during the Second World War, it did not involve engagement between ships of opposing fleets. At Midway, the two fleets never actually saw each other, and not a single shot was fired by ships on either side at the enemy. In the siege of Jerusalem, only one of the engaging sides employed ships, and the battle took place on dry land nearly sixty kilometres from the Mediterranean shore.

The siege of Jerusalem has not surprisingly entirely eluded the notice of historians of sea warfare. It was played out in the summer of 1099, and was an engagement between the army of the First Crusade and that of the Fatimids of Egypt who held the Holy City at that time. Prior to the arrival of the Christians, the Egyptians had cut down all the forests and disposed of the timber in the vicinity of Jerusalem, leaving the crusaders, who apparently did not bring any siege weapons with them, with no material with which to build ladders, towers, and siege machines. Without these, they were incapable of overcoming the city’s defences: its walls, forewalls, and moats. This difficulty delayed the conquest for several weeks but was finally resolved when some Genoese galleys that were anchored in the port of Jaffa were dismantled and their timber was brought up to the Holy City where they were reconstructed as three large siege towers. Two of these towers were destroyed in the ensuing battle, but one was brought up against the northern city wall and the troops climbing it entered the city, opened the gates, and brought about the conquest of Jerusalem and two centuries of Latin rule in the Holy Land.