Some more Crusades reading

Wargaming in the crusades seems to be in the air at the moment! We mentioned the recent release of Osprey’s Outremer: Faith and Blood, as well as the wide variety of other Crusading games out there. There’s also a series of articles currently running in Wargames Illustrated that should be of interest to our readers.

Steve Tibble is the author of Crusader Armies, a new book about, well, Crusader armies from Yale University Press. To tie in with this new release, he’s contributing a series of articles to WI about his work and how it could apply to wargaming. In the process, he’s challenging some of the assumptions about warfare in Outremer that often appear in medieval wargames.

We’re not going to summarise the articles here — there’s a lot to cover and they’re worth reading yourself — but there are a few points that are very relevant to Gaming a Crusader Castle, particularly in the article that appears in issue 370. In this piece, which is about sieges, Dr Tibble argues (among other points) that the crucial difference between early (mainly successful) Crusader sieges and Muslim strongholds and later (mainly unsuccessful) ones was distance from the sea. Close to ports, the Crusading armies were able to benefit from the supplies and technical expertise of mainly Italian fleets. Gangs of Italian ships’ carpenters are a pretty uncommon site on a wargaming table, but they may well have played a vital role in the success of the early Crusades. Since Italian crusaders play a big role in our project, we’re pretty excited about that fact.

Anyway, it isn’t all engineering and logistics: in the second article, which appears in issue 371, Tibble suggests that wargames err by making Crusader armies act too much like their European contemporaries and suggests that, rather than being an extension of European warfare, Crusading warfare quickly adapted to meet the challenges of a new environment, with the result that Crusader armies that look quite similar to contemporary European armies on paper might behave in quite different ways.

It’s thought-provoking stuff and it’s very relevant to this project; if you haven’t read it, it’s well worth checking out. If you’d like to discuss it, why not start a conversation here or on our Facebook group?