How to Plan a Crusade

Or, "it's complicated"

A typical portrayal of Richard the Lionheart is one of an impetuous, warlike king focused on killing and with little care for the responsibilities and mechanics of rule. A ‘bad son, bad husband, and a bad king’ (Sir Runciman), and all that. A careless ruler who neglected his country and couldn’t even be bothered to learn the language of his rule, English, and who led a failed crusade.

More recent research, and my own readings, suggest a very different portrait: a methodical planner, a careful delegator, a king focused on the Third Crusade, yet still concerned to ensure a stable government for England during his expected absence on crusade. One capable of extensive planning, administration and legislation, even when he was the best warrior of his age and his primary concern was in fact the Crusade.

The routes Crusaders took on the Third Crusade

John Gillingham’s recent biography of Richard, Richard I, outlines in detail Richard’s careful attention to governance, particularly through his appointment of a network of loyal and diligent administrators, both in the Church as well as his government. Gillingham argues that the correct metric to evaluate Richard is through the values and expectations of his age, and that by that standard Richard fares as well or better than any other English monarch, however contemporary values might rate him.

It seems clear that Richard believed in delegation, that essential tool of an effective leader. His father Henry II left many major church offices vacant, not least because he could then pocket the church’s revenues. In contrast, on becoming King, Richard moved rapidly to appoint leaders to most open positions (although we will see momentarily he may have had an ulterior motive himself). He created a governing council to rule England in his absence, consisting of his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, William Marshal (the ‘greatest knight of his age’), and justiciars Hugh de Puiset and William Longchamp, who replaced William de Mandeville who had recently died. He also appointed many new bishops, into positions that had been vacant. He resolved many delicate controversies through delicate negotiations, not head-knocking, negotiated peace with the Welsh kings on his border. He had a history of innovative lawmaking, as you can read in one of our previous posts.

Norse tales, pickpockets, and Richard's naval code

He applied himself to remaking the justice system with men loyal to him, and of quality. In particular of the 27 sheriffs of England, he replaced all but five. From Gillingham:

A recent systematic study of Richard's sheriffs by Dr Richard Heiser has investigated them all, not just the most famous cases which came to the attention of the chroniclers. His conclusion is that ‘prudence and foresight characterized Richard's placement of sheriffs, not carelessness and recklessness’, and that ‘Richard's handling of these officials shows that he understood and appreciated their significance, demonstrating that he was a monarch who was interested in the proper and efficient functioning of his English kingdom’. That offices as well as titles, charters and privileges should be bought and sold was all perfectly usual. It was simply that those transactions which were normally spread over several years were now concentrated into just one in order to meet the demands of an overriding need: the crusade. By these methods Richard raised enormous sums of money fast.

It is important to recall that by this time in his life, Richard had been waging war for over 15 years, against his father, for his father, then against his father. He has laid siege to dozens of castles in France, and taken virtually all of them at one time or another. He knows what war is, and he knows what it costs, in blood and in money. He is going on crusade and he is raising every person and penny he can, to fund the effort. “I would sell London itself, if I could but find a buyer,” he reportedly quipped when someone expressed dismay at his revenue-raising activities.

The Third Crusade planning

To really appreciate Richard’s abilities as a careful and methodical planner, it’s necessary to unpack his planning for the Third Crusade. The logistical efforts of a crusade are hard to overstate. Beginning just after his coronation, Richard would fund, equip and field an army of 10,000-20,000 troops and sail them from England and France, across the Mediterranean, conquering Messina and Cyprus along the way, and eventually landing at Acre in June of 1191.

I have recently been reading Dr. Christopher Tyerman’s How To Plan a Crusade. It is a wonderful summary of all the issues involved in, well, planning a crusade. It is an excellent lens through which to view Richard’s handling of the Third Crusade, and put the lie to his reputation as impetuous and unplanful. Much of what follows is drawn from this book.

There is a modern image of the Crusades as an act of mass irrational religious fervor, and to some extent that is true. Some of this can be attributed to clerical historians, more anxious to describe this as ‘God’s work’ than a military endeavor. But the crusades were also an exhaustively planned, logistically challenging, rational endeavor.

Many crusade planning activities would be familiar to a modern technology company executive (such as I used to be): international conferences (Richard attended some), meetings, budgets, contracts, briefings from intelligence sources, marketing campaigns, recruiting, contract recruiters (!), supply chain management, diplomats, spies, scouts. Richard’s crusade would basically be a traveling city - 10,000-20,000 people who needed ships, clothes, food, water, wine, money, armor, swords, horses for (potentially) years. Richard was the most successful of the crusader kings of his era; he fully equipped and paid for these troops and their supplies before he left England. In contrast, Philip II would constantly be negotiating with (and at the mercy of) whoever was in charge of wherever he happened to be, to supply his army. The history of the logistics of crusades can be found in the so-called Pipe Rolls in England (the records of the Exchequer of England capturing detailed tax revenues and expenses). Many of the activities can be seen in art work, such as the famous Bayeux tapestry depicting William the Conqueror’s invasion of England a hundred years before Richard.

To repeat: Richard equipped and paid for the travel, arms and subsistence for a moveable city of 10,000 people for a year, starting in June of 1190 until his arrival in Acre in June of 1191, a year later. This is not an impetuous activity, but one requiring careful planning and execution, and constant management. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics,” as the quote goes, usually attributed to General Omar Bradley.

Tyerman’s book identifies seven major requirements for a successful crusade, and goes on to show what these entailed and how they were satisfied:

1. A casus belli, a rationale.

2. Publicity and propaganda

3. Recruitment

4. Finance

5. Logistics

6. A plan of campaign

7. A wider geopolitical strategy

Casus Belli

A successful crusade required an “inciting incident”. Recruiting for the crusades from the period 1147-1187 struggled mightily to attract participants. But the disastrous battle of Hattin, where Saladin annihilated the crusader army almost to the last man, and the subsequent fall of Jerusalem changed all that. Those events sent shock waves through Europe. Pope Urban II reportedly died of shock on learning of the battle of Hattin. It was in this context that Richard was the first noble north of the Alps to take the cross and swear to go on crusade, in 1187 (entangled in a conflict with his father, he would not leave for crusade until two years had passed and he had become king).

Publicity and propaganda

Enormous effort, mostly led by the Catholic Church, was expended to build support for the crusades. This entailed sermons, letters, pamphlets, chronicles, traveling circuses, poems, songs, roving bands of preachers with a consistent message, centrally authored by the church, often the Pope himself, all executed throughout Europe. These propaganda efforts were designed to build support for the crusades, both moral and financial support, as well as the key goal: recruitment.

Recruitment

You can’t have a crusade without crusaders. Virtually everyone on crusade volunteered, they were not ordered per se, although significant public pressure was brought to bear on men of the right age. The church fielded its own small army of clerics, paid contract recruiters, who were tasked with signing up volunteers. Lists were kept of those who signed up. Documents tracking promised and paid wages were kept. Yes, most of the people on crusade were paid at some level, both in the promise of heavenly rewards as well as cold hard cash. As many as 3000 Welshmen were recruiting during the preaching tour of Lent 1188. Welsh long-bowmen, perhaps?

In this light, Richard’s replacement of the senior church leaders makes sense - they would be the drivers, the engine, of his recruitment drive for the Crusade.

Crusaders were protected by the church, immune from lawsuits, exempt from interest payments, and most importantly, granted remission of all sins. For the medieval mind, for whom religion was every-present, a powerful combination. Recruiters were equipped with many messages and tools to encourage participation.

Finance

Of course, all this had to be paid for. Richard embarked on an orgy of revenue generation, mostly from selling off government positions, church offices, land, property, assessing fines. The one thing he seems to have avoided was taking on debt. In addition, Henry II had instituted the so-called Saladin tax, a 10% tax on more-or-less everyone, specifically to fund his crusade. He created an entire office at Salisbury just to track the proceeds.

A brief note on currency at the time, in England: 1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pennies, or pence (£1 = 20s = 240d), as it would be written. For scale, a full year of normal royal revenues for England might be around £25,000 pounds. A laborer might have been paid 1d a day, a knight’s annual income might be £10-20. During the Crusade, a Lombard master siege engine constructor was paid 15 pounds Chartres money, the equivalent of nearly a year’s income for a laborer.

The Saladin tax produced an estimated £70,000. Since that had already been collected, Richard focused on raising revenue through selling offices (which was not untraditional, he just raised it to a new level). From Tyerman, some examples:

English preparations for the Third Crusade included hiring ships and men; laying in supplies (horseshoes, cured pigs’ carcasses, cheese, beans, arrows and crossbow-bolts); and budgeting for future wages. Costs were discounted in advance. A yearly tariff was set of 2d a day for soldiers and sailors and 4d for steersmen in Richard I’s fleet. By calculating future outlays, officials could provide the sums required for a year’s wages. Thus £2,402 18s 4d were accounted for at the Exchequer in 1190 to cover the future cost of 790 soldiers to be transported in 33 ships from the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex. Elsewhere, the forward wages for forty-five ships’ companies came to £3,338 2s 6d.11 Richard was thus able to assess in advance, if only in very general terms, how much parts of his campaign would cost.

The logistical efforts behind all of this were massive, and the activities and costs often recorded in the Pipe Rolls. While the costs were extremely large, they did not bankrupt the country. Richard would later be ransomed for £100,000 marks in 1194, a sum which would be (painfully) raised. By way of comparison, Richard spent £11,000 in 1196-8 to build his massive, famous castle Chateau Gaillard.

Banking services from the Knights Templars and the Hospitallers would later be used as well.

Logistics

This kind of effort involved massive logistical challenges and supply chain management. Richard spent £50 for 60,000 horseshoes. £101 for 14,000 cured pigs carcasses. Transport (ships), food, water, wine, materiel, arms, armor, medical provisions, all received careful and expert organization. Commercial fleets were hired, and new ships built. Budgets were prepared and recorded!

Food, water, wine were key. Daily consumption for crusade sailor would weigh 3 lbs a day - grain, flour, biscuit, cheese, salted meat (pork), dried beans. They would require a gallon of water per day for sailors, 2 gallons for marchers, and another gallon of wine per day. Horses would require 8 gallons of water per day and 10 pounds each of hay and grain for food. Per day! All of this had to be supplied and transported, or purchased or foraged along the route. Food wagons were required to transport this on land, and ships by sea. Much of this detail captured in contemporary documents or contracts.

Weaponry was supplied as well. Consider that Henry V’s army at Agincourt needed 3 MILLION ARROWS. Admittedly, the Welsh long-bowmen did not come to prominence until much later than Richard; still, he had archers, and especially crossbows, which Richard himself would use repeatedly at the siege of Acre. Iron arrowheads, pieces of bone or horn, all requiring a dedicated manufacturing processes. Helmets, shields, swords, spears, all had to be procured, stored, transported and distributed.

Richard was the first crusader to go to the Holy Land by sea. He would sail from France to Sicily (where his fleet was recorded at 200 ships), so the ships had to be sourced or built, and sailing materiel - canvas, rope, sails, spars, rudders, and so on, had to be procured.

All of this was complicated by the many languages in use English, French, Latin, German, Welsh, and more. A further complication was the many currencies - one crusader report from Poitiers in 1099 mentions seven different currencies!

Large weapons of war had to be built, or even transported. Richard shipped a siege engine and a wooden castle from Messina.

Richard supplied all this before setting out. Philip II acquired much of his on the way, through negotiation - a significant weakness / disadvantage. Richard’s planning shines through.

Most of this very carefully documented through the Pipe Rolls, lists of recruits, payment schedules, contracts, wills, …. this is a a large administrative state that Richard is responsible for. When the totality of all this is contemplated, it’s clear that Richard had a head for planning and knew how to delegate activities throughout his organization to achieve his ends.

A plan of campaign

Significant energy was applied to intelligence, in the form of scouts and spies, and in the development of maps, both land and sea. Previous crusades had left a great deal of information, and there was significant contact between the so-called Outremer Kingdom in the Holy Land ( the European crusaders and their descendants who lived there ) and Europe. In fact, Sybilla, the Queen of Jerusalem, was a distant cousin of Richard’s, and the King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, was theoretically a vassal of Richard’s through his holdings in France. (You may know Guy from a previous post, wherein he attempted to kidnap Eleanor of Aquitaine, and did battle with William Marshal). It’s all very confusing and inbred. :)

The Cast, Part II

Richard in particular did have a certain strategy for his Crusade, mostly in the early stages: get to the Holy Land and take Acre by siege, a task for which he was well suited, having taken so very many castles by siege during his life already. He would stop and conquer Cyprus, and while the historical record and Richard’s words themselves paint it as accidental, a number of historians have speculated that he intended to do so all along, as it formed a vital supply base for the holy land long after Richard was dead.

A wider geopolitical strategy

The longer term strategy for Richard’s crusade would be the place where the Crusade would founder. Richard came to realize that even if he took Jerusalem, he could not hold it, both because of a tenuous supply line, and because most of the Crusaders were there to take Jerusalem, and would leave when that was done, leaving the city undefended.

Richard attempted to persuade his fellow crusaders to instead first take Egypt, the source of Saladin’s money, troops, and supplies. But he was unable to convince them; people think a King can do whatever he likes, but in the end, leaders only lead with the consent of the governed. The crusade would founder when Richard and Saladin would fight to a stalemate, and negotiate a truce. Having organized an enormous crusade, Richard would never return.