The Bayeux Tapestry is the most famous misnomer in English history, being stitched embroidery not woven tapestry. In describing the fateful and fatal events surrounding the successful invasion of England in 1066 by Duke William of Normandy, the story is framed by epic, romance and homily to construct a personal drama from the narrative of high politics and war. Within this, the Tapestry reveals the prosaic mechanics behind the invasion. The story is punctuated by the transit of messengers, scouts or spies. Before action, both in Normandy and on arrival in England, William is shown taking advice with his close councillors. Space is lavished on the details of ship-building, from tree felling to carpenters fitting planks and the completed vessels being dragged by pulleys to the shore to be launched. Before embarkation, the necessary provisions and equipment are paraded in detail. Men and carts are shown bearing coats of mail, swords, helmets and spears (shields seemingly were brought by the cavalrymen themselves) along with wine barrels and wineskins. Across the Tapestry events are accompanied by the particulars of war: armour, swords, spears, lances, maces, axes, bows, arrows, horses and their harness, and, not least, the supply and consumption of food. Just as the final scenes before departure from France concern logistics of supplies and transport, so the first images following the landings at Pevensey depict the invaders foraging, cooking, baking and feasting, all before they build a wooden fort for protection, in a loud pre-echo of Napoleon’s famous clichéd dictum.1
Such seemingly mundane details contribute to the tightening of dramatic tension, building towards the final confrontation at Hastings. They also resonated with an audience of military aristocrats, lay and clerical. Even where inaccurate or distorted by artistic design, the inclusion of these images point to their importance. The pictures in the Bayeux Tapestry open a window onto the world of the First Crusade a generation later, an adventure on which one of the heroes of the Tapestry, and possible patron of its creation, William’s brother Bishop Odo of Bayeux, died. Portrayed as a distinctly military churchman, Odo’s is perhaps the earliest surviving visual portrait of a future crucesignatus (plate 20).2 The Tapestry’s far from incidental evidence of preparations, logistics and military domestic life is paralleled in details of crusaders’ preparations and equipment in charters and from the narratives of chroniclers and poets. These interests remained central both to the practical consideration of warfare and how it was perceived. Three centuries later, in the glowing illuminations in the fourteenth-century manuscript statutes of the Neapolitan chivalric Order of the Knot (1352), details of embarkation on crusade find a similarly prominent place.3 Once again victuals, military equipment and horses feature beside various classes of oared galleys and a sailing cargo vessel. Crusade planners required a cause, money, men, information, organization and a plan of action. They also needed supplies: food, arms, horses, ships, fortifications and siege engines.
Organizers left as little as possible to chance, with extensive systems for collecting war materiel stretched by the demands of long-distance crusading. Technical details were carefully considered before a step was taken. Whether these were influenced by theoretical manuals is debatable. Contemporary compilations such as the Mappae Clavicula (A Little Key to the World) contain seemingly relevant recipes for incendiary devices, flaming arrows and fire-resistant battering rams that on inspection prove unscientific, obscure and impractical.4 More soundly based treatises held mixed usefulness.5 The practical aspects of warfare attracted some academics, like Oliver of Paderborn, grounded in the mathematics of the classical curriculum. The standing of engineers, architects and master carpenters during the twelfth century elevated some of them to professional status, able to command professional fees.6 Nevertheless, such skills remained rooted in artisan pragmatism, stimulated by immediate needs of the march, siege or battlefield, not contemplation in a cloistered study. Count Geoffrey of Anjou may have consulted the Roman Vegetius’s manual on warfare, and earned a reputation for carpentry and engineering, even devising a bomb, but as a commander rather than practitioner. Henry I of England showed practical enthusiasm rather than expertise at the siege of Pont Audemer in Normandy in 1123 when he encouraged his team of carpenters to build a 24-foot-high moveable siege tower. Henry and Geoffrey may have been intelligent, observant and well educated with a natural interest in all aspects of military enterprise, but that does not necessarily mean they were expert technical engineers, any more than Gaston IV of Béarn, who led siege operations on one section of the walls of Jerusalem in 1099 and went on to act in a similar role at the siege of Zaragoza in 1118 where, it was said, he had experts working under him. The Lombard engineer who sold his skills dearly at Nicaea operated as overseer of a team.7
Improvisation, specialization, command and co-operation braided together in every aspect of supplies and materiel. Some strategic thinking was evident. Carpentry and weaponry, along with shipping and maritime trade, provided the crusaders with some of the few areas in which they could compete, or even claim an advantage over their opponents in the Near East. The basic raw materials of wood and iron were in theory jealously protected; trading these commodities with Muslim powers was outlawed by the Third Lateran Council in 1179 on pain of excommunication, deprivation of property and reduction to the status of a slave. The ban, which extended to weaponry, navigational aid and military intelligence, was repeated at the Fourth Lateran Council and subsequent papal crusade appeals. In the same vein, pirates and anyone trading with them were repeatedly condemned as preying on the vital supply lines to the eastern Mediterranean.8 Economic warfare was well understood, even if largely incapable of being effectively pursued, given that policing the seas was impossible. The gathering of provisions and materiel, by contrast, relying on long experience of war and logistics, was more firmly grounded in effective practice.
FOOD
Food and drink determined the course of crusades, through the need for markets, foraging or plunder for land armies, or through the rate of consumption of prepared supplies by forces transported by ship. Behind these logistics lay the varying regional levels of domestic agricultural production and the ability to exploit them. Statistics are impossible, yet in general terms crusading depended on the expanding productivity of rural Europe as it did on the consequent increased intensity of commerce. It has been suggested that while it took the labour of nine workers to feed one horse for a year in eleventh-century Europe, two hundred years later it only demanded two or three.9 Adequate provisioning was central from the outset. The timing of local harvests, even when not abundant, necessarily ordered the timing of the departures of the land contingents on the First, Second and Third Crusades. Similarly, the requirement for winter bases to refit and restock shaped successive crusades: Constantinople in 1096-7, for the Germans in 1147-8 and the Fourth Crusade in 1203–4; Frederick Barbarossa’s occupation of Thrace in 1189–90; Richard I and Philip II in Sicily in 1190–91; the Flemish fleet at Marseilles in 1202–3; in 1217–18 the Netherlanders and Rhinelanders at Lisbon and Alcazar and the Frisians at Civitavecchia; the musters at Acre in 1217–18 and Cyprus in 1248–9. The tensions surrounding access to markets and fair prices provided a leitmotif in all eastern crusading, both in transit to and on arrival in the Holy Land.
The search for secure supply chains was constant: the markets of the Danube Basin and the north Balkans in 1096–7, 1147–8 and 1189; Cyprus or the fertile regions of northern Syria during and after the siege of Antioch in 1097–8; Byzantine markets in Asia Minor in 1147–8; Cyprus after its seizure by Richard I in 1191. Given the hostile hinterlands, supplying the many thousands camped at Acre in 1189–91 or Damietta in 1218–21 demanded sourcing provisions from across the eastern Mediterranean, and possibly beyond, unless there was a greater degree of commercial exchange between the competing armies than appears in the sources. These, at least for the Third Crusade, suggest little more than fraternizing for paid sex.10 Some staples, such as salted pork, would have been largely unobtainable from Muslim regions. Louis IX’s agents were active in Cyprus for two years before his crusade arrived in 1248, building up stores of grain and wine, a precedent followed by his brother Alphonse of Poitiers in buying up provisions in Apulia and Sicily in 1269. Louis may have taken salt pork or bacon with him from France, as Richard I did from England in 1190.11 On campaign, the imperatives of supply provoked risky and often disastrous forays beyond crusader lines, whether outside Antioch in 1098 or from Damietta in 1220.12 Before any crusade embarked, markets and supplies framed diplomacy, particularly in the first three great eastern campaigns with the Hungarians and Greeks, and shipping treaties, such as those with Genoa in 1190 and Venice in 1201. Failure to secure basic logistics could shatter or twist the bestlaid plans: the German and French expeditions’ lack of adequate markets in Asia Minor in 1147–8; or the crusaders in Venice in 1202 consuming supplies intended for the future campaign.13
A fundamental difficulty concerned the need to carry victuals set against their weight and bulk, a problem on land and sea. It has been estimated by modern scholars that the daily food consumption for a man on board a crusade ship (which presumably would not radically differ from the amount needed for a footslogger on land) was 1.3 kilos, made up chiefly of grain or flour (which weighed less) to make bread or biscuit; small amounts of cheese; salted meat, ubiquitously pork, and dried legumes. To drink, crusaders’ daily intake of liquid may have come to between 3 and 4 litres a day for inactive seaborne troops, but 8 litres for those on moderate active duty short of fighting.14 In the Mediterranean, drink could comprise wine of varying amounts, possible between 1 and 2 litres a day (remember the wineskins and hogsheads of the Bayeux Tapestry, suggesting wine not just for the bosses). Notoriously, the Norwegians underestimated the strength of the retsina they quaffed at Constantinople in 1110, with disastrous consequences.15 Additionally, horses, even on land and used to being stall fed, required 5 kilos of grain, 5 of hay and 32 litres of water each, ten times the weight of a man’s daily diet.16 This presented organizers with a dual problem: cartage and restocking. On land, a military column’s capacity to carry its own supplies was limited by the number of food wagons required and their drag on the speed of march. At sea, the conundrum revolved around the clashing imperatives of space, given the bulkiness of liquids, and the need for fresh water, for cooking and, especially, horses that obviously could not drink wine. For land crusaders such conflicts were tackled by frequent recourse to local markets or, in hostile territory, foraging; and, at sea, by frequent landfalls to replenish water supplies. Such enforced strategies involved either diplomatic finesse or military risk, or both.
Most of these calculations of amounts of food and drink rest on contemporary estimates: the Genoa treaty of 1190; the Venice treaty of 1201; Louis IX’s contracts with the Venetians in 1268; crusade advice provided by Marseilles in 1318; or Marino Sanudo’s detailed analysis of the practical requirements of crusading naval blockades. To this list, which excludes non-crusade quartermasters’ calculations, could be added Emperor Henry Vi’s 1195 offer of grain to his paid crusader knights and sergeants.17 Contracts contained detailed and exact provisions for supplying men and horses. The Venetian treaty of 1201 specified provisions for up to a year, i.e. during a year not necessarily for a whole year. The amounts for each man within the contract are precisely configured: six sextaria (c.400 kilos) of bread, flour, grain and legumes (perhaps enough for ten months) and half an amphora (perhaps 340 litres) of wine (just over a litre a day if spread over ten months). The horses were to be provided with three modia of grains, about a cubic metre or c.800 kilos, enough for a year, but omitting the necessary supplement of hay or grazing which constituted about three-quarters of a horse’s food diet. This omission implied either that hay and/or pasture were expected to be readily available at Venice or at the necessarily frequent watering stops en route east. Similarly, an unspecified sufficiency of water was also included in the terms of the treaty.18 This Venetian thoroughness was mirrored just over a century later by Marino Sanudo. Besides exhaustive details of geography, tactics, manning, shipping (down to the best season to cut timber), weaponry and wages, Sanudo provided extraordinarily precise estimates for the consumption of biscuits, wine, meat, cheese and beans for 1 day, 30 days, 12 months and 5¼ days (a working week?) for one man, then for ten, a hundred, one thousand, ten thousand and one hundred thousand men.19
Comparable attention to provisioning is evident from earlier campaigns. Albert of Aachen described the carts of food supplies that accompanied Peter the Hermit’s march down the Danube, the often rapacious search for new provisions and the hardship suffered in Bulgaria ‘because they had lost over two thousand wagons and carts which were carrying corn, barley, and meat’. Peter’s forces were reduced to roasting ears of newly ripened corn (it was July) to survive, a suggestion that came from Peter’s advisers. The example of the collapse of Peter’s provisioning into desperate chaotic hand-to-mouth larceny led Godfrey of Bouillon, a few months later, to negotiate a detailed trading agreement with the king of Hungary.20 The importance of crusaders’ victuals dominate passages of veterans’ accounts of later expeditions, the cliché of it being a matter of life or death for once being literally true. The problems were most agonizing, protracted and dangerous for land armies, problems well anticipated judging by the exhaustive preparatory diplomatic negotiations to secure markets and equitable trading conditions in 1096,1146–7 and 1188–9. Odo of Deuil claimed to have included so much topographical detail in his account of the march of the French army in 1147 in order to advise and warn successors of the difficulties in securing provisions. He also described how progress of the French march was severely impeded by slow-moving packhorses and carts clogging up the roads.21 Foraging for food presented problems of discipline as well as organization. As the German host trundled through Bulgaria in late July 1189, the servants and other youths who had been detailed to collect grain, honey and vegetables began to indulge themselves in wholesale theft. Although they and their knightly masters were severely taken to task by the high command, their freelance robberies stand as reminders of the difficulties and temptations but, above all, of the natural human dimensions in these vast undertakings that no amount of pious gloss could wholly conceal.22
Sea passage in some respects made the difficulties more predictable and contained, especially if the crusade leadership furnished its own carrying fleet. The contrast between the fortunes of Philip II and Richard I is revealing. While Richard provisioned his own fleet, Philip had to negotiate supplies, ‘victui necessaria’ as the chronicler Rigord commented, from the Genoese, which were to last only eight months. Consequently, before securing a share in Richard’s Sicilian windfall, at Messina in the winter of 1190–91, Philip had to cast about for ways to supply his forces on the next leg of the journey. Clearly toying with a land route, which he may have calculated would be cheaper and offered easier provisioning, Philip approached the king and queen of Hungary, asking for help with food supplies (‘ut sibi subvenirent in victualibus’), and the Byzantine emperor, requesting safe passage, implicitly seeking guaranteed access to markets.23
Richard’s position was quite different. From the start his officials exerted a degree of direct control over provisioning. He committed to providing food for a year for the knights, infantrymen, sailors and horses in his fleet, which, on the evidence of one observer, Richard of Devizes, could have numbered 100 vessels, carrying 80 men and 40 horses, with another 14 ships carrying 160 men and 80 horses.24 On these figures, Richard was providing for about 10,000 men and 5,000 horses. If the scale of his preparations and the survival of record evidence stand out, in essence Richard’s problems and solutions mirrored the general crusader’s condition, in this case the need for non-perishable food and other essentials. For once evidence is not reliant solely on admiring chronicle descriptions of military preparations. The accounts of the English Exchequer, recorded on the Pipe Rolls, chart some of the collection of food supplies for Richard’s crusade fleet. From Essex and Hertfordshire came 140 cheeses, clearly, at almost 4s 6d each, quite substantial ones, and 300 bacon carcasses; from Hampshire 800 bacon carcasses, 100 cheeses (6d cheaper than those from Essex and Hertfordshire); 20 measures of beans at 1s each, and 10,000 horseshoes with nails; from Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire 100 measures of beans at 1s each; from Lincolnshire 300 bacons at 1s 5d each; from Gloucestershire, with its iron works in the Forest of Dean, 50,000 horseshoes and nails, an additional supply of iron worth £100, and 276 measures of dried beans; from the Tower of London, the armoury of the capital, came crossbow bolts and 3,600 crossbow arrowheads.25
Some important requirements are missing from the Pipe Roll accounts: grain, wine, hay for horses and armour for the hired soldiers being transported by sea or those following Richard overland to Marseilles. What seem to be noted were the secondary necessities for which the king had made himself responsible, including for horses, which traditionally fell to lords and commanders to support and even supply replacements. Even here, the Pipe Roll listing of 60,000 horseshoes would only serve an active cavalry force of 5,000 for perhaps three months.26 Armour was probably the responsibility of each soldier; certainly knights and their équipes would have provided their own. The crossbowmen’s equipment indicated that they were in the king’s employ; at Acre he was to offer to take all the crusade host’s archers into his paid service.27 In general, although the Pipe Roll evidence is indicative rather than comprehensive, representing only a fraction of his total supply of victuals and equipment, Richard’s provisions reflected the standard requirements for crusade leaders and led. Scales might differ, with the involvement of private commercial entrepreneurs more or less prominent, and the extent of dispositions of individual crusaders, as opposed to collective leaderships, variable. However, the model of what was required and prepared remained consistent. The quartermaster stood behind events, one of the great missing presences in crusade narratives.
HORSES
Horses were central to western European military tactics and culture. Unsurprisingly, horses feature in two-thirds of the Bayeux Tapestry, by no means all in scenes of battle. Military effectiveness and social status alike relied on the possession of horses. The reality that much crusade warfare actually revolved around sieges – Nicaea, Antioch, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Damascus, Acre, Zara, Constantinople, Toulouse, Damietta – did nothing to diminish their importance. Providing mounts, replacements or compensation for their loss formed a part of lordship’s patronage of knights.28 A central task for planners was to ensure a continuous supply. Land armies needed to carry or acquire grain as well as hay and to provide regular pasturage, which could divert the route, riskily break the column or delay the march. The need for re-shoeing demanded the employment of regiments of blacksmiths, although their expertise could also assist in constructing siege engines or mending and replacing weaponry. The loss of horses and the necessity to replenish stocks influenced the course of campaigns, as on the First Crusade. Strategically, horses limited how crusades were planned. Until technology and naval engineering allowed for their long-distance transport by sea, in the first half of the twelfth century, war horses had to go by land, with only short sea journeys, such as those of the Norman armies across the English Channel in 1066, the straits of Messina in 1061 and, more riskily, the Adriatic in the Normano-Byzantine wars of the 1080s; or the Pisan attack on Mahdia in 1087.29 Mounted contingents on the First and Second crusades were therefore forced to travel by land, with restricted ferry crossings of the Adriatic or Bosporus.30 The great northern coalition fleet that assembled at Dartmouth and attacked Lisbon in 1147 did not carry horses, the knights on board presumably intending to acquire mounts once they reached the Holy Land – a feasible policy as Palestine was largely in friendly hands, unlike fifty years earlier. The siege of Lisbon was an infantry affair.31 A resident in Jerusalem commented that the new Frankish kingdom had been in peril in 1101 partly because reinforcements by sea were unable to bring horses with them.32 This changed. The lead was taken in the south. Horses were shipped long distances during campaigns in the western Mediterranean in 1114–15. The Venetian crusade of 1122 was supposed to have embarked with 15,000 fighting men and 300 horses.33 The history of Mediterranean crusading was transformed.
The logistics of transporting horses by sea presented acute challenges. Horses occupied considerable space, as did their feed. They needed regular supplies of fresh water, hay or pasturage, which may explain the frequent stops and leisurely progress of the Venetian fleet from the lagoon to the Levant between August 1122 and May 1123 and of other crusade fleets recorded by veterans of sea passages. Each day, a well-nourished horse could produce c. 25 kilos of faeces and as much as 36 litres of urine.34 Successful carriage by sea required purpose-built or modified ships and specialist skills. The weight of the necessary iron had to be considered as well. A horseshoe might weigh between 280 and 425 grams; Richard’s 60,000 could therefore have weighed between 16 and 25.5 tonnes. A single set of six nails per shoe might weigh a further 84 grams (14 grams each), which would add another 5 tonnes; the Pipe Rolls suggest two sets were taken, which meant 10 tonnes for the nails. Small wonder Frederick Barbarossa was deterred from essaying the sea route by the size of his army, perhaps 10–12,000 men, with 3,000 knights-and their horses.35 Whether or not Richard of Devizes’ figures for the 1190 Angevin fleet are correct, in particular for the number of horses, the attendant problems are clear; so, too, the success in dealing with them. Richard may have taken far fewer than the 5,000 horses of Richard of Devizes’ description. However, Philip II’s contract with Genoa specified 1,300 horses (albeit with a get-out clause stipulating the need for new terms for shipping without horses) and the Venice treaty of 1201, 4,500. Shipping contracts for Louis IX’s first crusade included precise details of horse transport and cost.36 By 1248, as for the previous assault on Damietta in 1218 or the crusade of 1202-4, it was assumed that crusaders would sail with their horses.
SHIPPING
One of the few clear advantages possessed by crusaders over their enemies lay in shipping and the ability to sail and row long distances. They were well aware of it. Crusade ships were blessed on departure; Cross-giving liturgies included prayers for their safe return.37 During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, maritime technology allowed Latin Christians to dominate trade across the Mediterranean; to seize ports around the Iberian coast, invade the Balearic Islands, Sicily, the Adriatic coast of the Balkans, Tunisia, Cyprus and the coastal lands of the north and eastern Baltic; and to supply the new settlements in the Levant with colonists, tourists, raw materials and commerce. The ability to transport horses by sea immeasurably advanced Latin power on all fronts of political expansion. To landlubbers, this could appear wondrous. John of Joinville, from a family steeped in generations of crusade service, remembered seeing his horses loaded onto a ship at Marseilles in August 1248:
the port of the ship [i.e. a door in the stern] was opened, and all the horses we wanted to take to Outremer with us were put inside and then the door was closed again and plugged well, as when a cask is caulked, because when the ship is on the high sea, the whole door is under water.38
In fact, these hatches were probably only completely covered sporadically, when the ship rolled in the sea swell.
As the detailed contracts Louis IX and his followers secured with Genoa and Marseilles demonstrated, planners paid close attention to precise details of ship construction to obtain suitable vessels. There was even talk – possibly garbled – of the count of St Pol in 1248 having to source a suitable vessel from as far away as Inverness. The Genoese contracts itemized the exact dimensions of keel, decks, bulwarks, forecastles, sterncastles and masts (two, fore and midships).39 Accommodation for horses formed just one aspect of the rapid development of the types of ships used by crusaders: cargo carriers, troop ships, landing craft, sailing vessels and oared galleys. Technologies of form and construction differed locally between northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Oars and sail were combined in both. Single-masted, open, half-decked oared ships, such as the Norse knerrir and larger snekkjur, or open lateen-rigged sailing transports familiar from ships of the Viking age and the Bayeux Tapestry, or the Mediterranean equivalent naves, were gradually supplanted by multi-decked sailing vessels of the sort described in the Genoese contracts and large adapted cargo ships. Ocean-going round-hulled cogs of northern Europe appeared on crusade in the later twelfth century, becoming familiar carriers in the Mediterranean in the thirteenth. Bireme oared galleys, powered by two (or later three) men per bench, were joined by oared triremes; as early as 1189 Clement III was writing of the departure of fifty Danish and twelve Frisian armed triremes.40
Dimensions varied. Richard I commanded at least one sixty-oared esnecca (literally ‘snake’) that made the trip from England to Syria.41 Clear distinctions were made by planners and hirers between types of vessel, even if their exact characteristics now remain unclear. Richard of Devizes distinguished between busses, with twice the capacity of the naves, in 1190 and noted that the armada Richard led from Sicily comprised 156 naves, 24 busses and 39 galleys. At Marseilles Richard had hired ten busses and twenty galleys.42 His own accounts point to different sized vessels. His officials trawled the ports of southern England commandeering vessels, usually for two-thirds of their full value, at an average of £50 per ship. Their variety can be judged from the different sizes of crews (between twenty-one and sixty-one on the Pipe Rolls, echoed by Richard of Devizes’ figures of between thirty and sixty). It has been estimated that the fleet that sailed from Venice in 1202 comprised a few grand sailing vessels for the high command, 150 horse transports and 50 galleys (provided by the Venetian war fleet), assuming ship’s companies of 600 passengers. Crewmen were required, possibly in numbers not far short of the soldiers they were transporting.43 Accounts of veterans distinguish between a parade of vessels, even though the language was usually more literary than technical and precise characteristics are elusive: barges, cogs, dromons (an oared vessel), galleys with two or single banks of oars, longships, skiffs, rowing boats or just generic naves, ships. The choice of vessel was not neutral. The presence of specialist horse-carrying galleys in the 1201 Venetian contract might indicate the goal of the fleet was not a port but beaches – Egypt not Acre.44
Greater clarity of function appeared in shipping contracts. The Treaty of Venice specified specialist horse-carrying transport galleys, uissiers, as well as naves for the bulk of troops. These horse transports, also known as taridae, were fitted with stern ports for embarking and disembarking horses, used effectively before the walls of Constantinople.45 Frederick II planned to take fifty such vessels on crusade in the I220S, each capable of holding forty horses.46 In 1246, Louis IX ordered twelve taridae from the Genoese, with capacity for twenty horses each. He also commissioned further horse transports and landing craft in Cyprus.47 Not all these schemes worked as intended. Although a local Outremer lord, the count of Jaffa, seems to have successfully beached his landing craft at Damietta in 1249, most of the French, having disembarked from large ships to small ones, still had to wade ashore in the face of enemy fire, the king included; another classic case of the limits of planning.48
The restriction of numbers of horses per horse-transport ship, between twenty and forty seeming to be the usual range in the mid-thirteenth century, raised the costs of crusading. It also reflected the greater care afforded the animals, each held upright in individual stalls by a form of cradle that prevented them falling over because of the sea’s swell or in storms. Horses were high value items of military equipment needing careful handling and protection at sea as on land. Such specialist vessels lay at the top end of the market, luxury military equipment subject to high price contracts, as in 1201 (each uissier perhaps with a capacity of thirty horses) or 1246. The large converted cargo vessels, such as cogs, could, ad hoc, carry far more: eighty in Richard I’s busses, according to Richard of Devizes; accommodation for sixty horses in addition to passengers in a Marseilles lease of a ship to the count of Forez for his voyage to Cyprus in 1248; a hundred on the lowest deck in a Marseilles contract for Louis IX’s second crusade of 1268.49 Conditions below decks can hardly have been anything but primitive and grim: the Marseilles contract implied stowage for men and horses indiscriminately.
The treatment of the crusaders on board ship was not neglected. The increase in cabin space and decking spared passengers exposure to the elements. The numbers carried varied. The company on board the St Victor from Marseilles in 1250, excluding crew, numbered 453. Louis IX’s flagship on his return from Acre in 1254 held over 500. In the thirteenth century Marseilles legislated for complements of 500 to 550 passengers in ships bound for the Levant. Some transport vessels apparently held a greater capacity, over 1,000 in the case of one Genoese ship in 1248. The 80 to 160 on Richard I’s ships in 1190 was on the low side, reflecting perhaps the horses and amount of materiel taken with them, although one ship in the fleet, hired by Londoners, also carried between 80 and 100 people. The English chronicler Ralph of Diceto, with close contacts with some of the crusaders involved, estimated that 37 ships in 1189 from England, Denmark and Flanders carried 3,500 passengers between them.50 Some vessels may have been much smaller, at least on the Mediterranean leg. By contrast, the great northern cogs and Mediterranean passenger carriers, many, if not all, like Richard I’s fleet, adapted from cargo ships, encouraged the formation of substantial temporary communities, adopting their own patron saints, as did the Londoners in 1189–90, or, like the passengers on the St Victor in 1250, acting together in a lawsuit. Floating communes were not the prerogative of crusaders. The pirate flotilla from northern Europe that apparently put in at Tarsus in the autumn of 1097 was described as a sworn association.51
Such arrangements did not eradicate social distinctions. Grandees like James of Vitry might secure more cabin space than ordinary spear carriers. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade cruised across the Adriatic and Aegean in large sailing ships with roomy upper decks, just as Louis IX did in the eastern Mediterranean, while lesser ranks squeezed into galleys.52 Conditions were cramped but not disorderly. A form of martial law prevailed. Living accommodation was regulated. Every ordinary passenger, at least on thirteenth-century Marseilles ships, who might be paying up to 25 shillings each, was given a parchment ticket with his name and number and instructions on which crew member he was to mess with. Scribes kept copies of each crusader’s name and a record of cargo and horses. It was a business, with crusaders eager and, occasionally, vulnerable clients. The Marseilles rules forbad ships’ masters from being in business with the providers of food, the latter having to accompany the voyage, a potentially rather effective disincentive to fraud. Bribing scribes, presumably in the hope of preferential treatment or a better berth, was outlawed. Such anxieties were not new. The 1190 Genoa contract included a fair-dealing clause.53 Crusaders were men of affairs no less than their entrepreneurial maritime partners.
The near-monopoly of Latin Christians in long-distance shipping was closely allied to the sophistication of carpentry across Europe. The profession of Christ, carpentry attracted a degree of social kudos for its master craftsmen directly linked to its social and economic importance. Medieval culture was largely built in wood, used for shelter, accommodation, display, building, fuel, storage, wheels, ladders, carts, boats, bridges, barrels, fishing, domestic utensils, saddles, arrows, crossbow bolts and spear shafts. The flexibility of timber technology combined with the skill of carpenters found striking confirmation during the crusades. Ships often played central roles, proving highly adaptable. The success of the assault on the walls of Constantinople in 1204, and the capture of the Tower of Chains at Damietta in 1218, depended on the conversion of transport ships into floating siege engines, a technique familiar from the siege of Lisbon.54 For his raid into the Red Sea in 1183, Reynald of Châtillon apparently used ships that had been dismantled, carried across the desert and then reassembled.55 More often, the timbers of crusade ships were recycled. In 1192, Richard I re-used timber from smashed cargo ships to construct new troop carriers on the coast of southern Palestine.56 The requirements of siege engines for finished planks and beams invited cannibalizing ships’ timbers if crusader forces had failed to bring ready-made materials with them. Timber from recently arrived western fleets may have been used to build siege towers at Jerusalem in 1099; certainly salvaged ropes, hammers, nails, axes, mattocks and hatchets from Genoese ships were employed.57 The relative paucity of seasoned timber in the Near East provided one incentive, particularly when large throwing engines required long beams, for which ships’ masts could be effective.
A simple fact of navigation also encouraged the re-use of ships’ timbers in crusade warfare in the Levant. From 1098 onwards, fleets from northern Europe assisted in campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean, some travelling very great distances from Scandinavia, northern Germany and the British Isles. However, none returned. The Atlantic flows into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar in a passage of c.45 miles, with a strong surface current from west to east of c.6 knots, almost impossible for a galley to row against successfully. The prevailing winds also blow west to east. Only by hugging the coast would it have been feasible to get through from east to west, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries all of the southern shore, and much of the northern, lay in hostile hands. Eventually, the addition of extra sails and heightened sides enabled galleys to overcome these obstacles. Yet the first recorded ship from the Mediterranean to reach northern waters via the Straits only arrived in 1277.58 Consequently, northern crusaders who came by sea had to find a different return route, usually via the ports of Italy and southern France and then overland. For crusade leaders, this added to the complexity of their arrangements. The currents in the Straits of Gibraltar, combined with cack-handed diplomacy, forced Richard I to risk returning from Palestine via Austria and led directly to his capture by Duke Leopold, imprisonment in Germany and ransom.
Less dramatically, the ultimate redundancy of many of the cogs and other ships from the north, added to natural physical degradation of hulls and timbers and the reduction in return passenger numbers because of the casualty rate, further encouraged the re-use of materials. The flag pole of Richard I’s ‘Standard’ was almost certainly a ship’s mast. It is hard to see where else the necessary timber and parts could have been assembled from for the huge stone-throwing machines and other siege engines built after the arrival at Acre of Richard and Philip II, not least as these were in addition to the siege machinery the crusaders had brought with them. Crusaders from Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg built their field hospital outside Acre in 1190 out of timbers and canvas from their ships, materials ubiquitous in that and all other similar crusader camps.59 The English hospice established in the camp at Acre at the same time probably exploited the same resource. The provision of ships, therefore, involved more than a means of transport. As ready stores of vital military and domestic raw materials, spare parts and even as siege machines in their own right, ships provided a very diverse and sustained resource for any crusade army, on land as well as on the seas.
SIEGE MACHINES
It is unlikely that crusade organizers necessarily planned for the dismantling of their ships; and certainly not for those hired in the Mediterranean. However, they did prepare for siege warfare. The main siege equipment comprised means to scale walls, often wooden towers on wheels or rollers as well as ladders; to undermine walls, a process needing overhead and side protection; to batter walls, with huge throwing devices such as mangonels or trebuchets; or to break down gates with rams. Another option, used at Antioch in 1097–8 and to a more limited extent at Messina in 1190 and at Acre in 1191, were counter-forts to prevent enemy or defenders’ access or egress. The First Crusade’s initial siege, at Nicaea, required machines to be constructed on site, presumably with materials supplied by the Byzantines. The leaders were careful to stockpile both machines and raw materials, Albert of Aachen referring to the piles of wood, including oak beams, stored by the princes during the siege.60 The strategy of counter-forts and subterfuge at Antioch suggest the crusaders did not take such raw materials with them on their march. The appearance of siege engines again on the march south might reflect the coincidence of the arrival of supporting Italian and northern fleets. Every crusade was accompanied by potentially expert engineers, some, like Gaston IV of Béarn on the First Crusade, or Archdeacon William of Paris during the Languedoc crusade, combining roles – in William’s case with that of a recruiting preacher.61 On at least one occasion, during the Third Crusade, crusaders recruited enemy siege experts under duress.62
Although most siege engines continued to be constructed on site to suit immediate demands, by the Third Crusade commanders were transporting siege weapons and construction materials from the west. In 1190 Count Henry of Champagne arrived at Acre with French siege engines, possibly including throwing machines.63 A year later, Richard I had arranged for ships in his fleet to carry materials specifically to build siege machines, possibly alongside pre-fabricated mangonels, presumably transported in sections. The necessary technology was available. A year later he shipped his stone-throwers in sections by sea to besiege Darum in southern Palestine.64 Possession of large stonethrowing machines acted as symbols of status and martial virility; each of the main leaders at Acre possessed their own and one was even built at the expense of the common crusade fund. Trebuchets were reputed to be capable of throwing horses and were probably able to hurl stones of between 90 and 135 kilos up to 275 metres. A not-always friendly rivalry appeared to develop around their power and effectiveness. They were given names: Bad Neighbour (Malvoisine) or God’s Stone-thrower. How many were brought ready-made is unknowable; probably some, possibly many. In 1202, the crusader fleet that sailed from Venice to Zara took on board, so Geoffrey of Villehardouin remembered, ‘more than three hundred petraries [i.e. stone-throwers of various sorts and sizes] and mangonels’.65
Predictably, perhaps, one of the most extravagant demonstrations of combined technology and planning was associated with Richard I. In the winter of 1190/91 he had built a wooden castle outside Messina, both as a secure headquarters and to intimidate the locals. (It was called, with typical subtlety, ‘Mattegriffon’, or ‘Kill the Locals’.) This he dismantled, packed up in sections and took with him to Palestine, where he re-erected it outside the walls of Acre. This technology may not have been new. The mid-twelfth-century Norman historical romancer, Wace, claimed that William the Conqueror took ready-made forts with him to England in 1066. Richard’s castle acted as more than a symbol of bravado. It provided both a siege fortress and secure base, far superior to the more customary corral of tents.66 In romance and fiction, Richard was and is portrayed as the epitome of the chivalric crusade warrior and leader. In ways wholly unglamorous but more significant to the running of the wars of the Cross – in planning, strategy, logistics, administration and execution – this image stands.