foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and The Cambridge History of the Crusades (2023).
Tibble's publications have been critically acclaimed and include The Crusader Armies (2018) and The Crusader Strategy (2020), short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize), and Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain (2023).
Tibble applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land, and reported the following:
Page 99 is a microcosm of the central thesis of Crusader Criminals - the idea that the medieval Middle East became a 200-year long demographic vortex, pulling in 'the usual suspects' from across most of the known world, into a dystopian blood-fest that was as much about criminality as it was about warfare. It looks at the example of the Turkic entrants into the arena, but the book as a whole looks at all the cultures, ethnicities and religions involved. Here goes with a cut down version of the page:Visit Steve Tibble's website.Crusaders visiting the area might have been unruly; but the situation was, if anything, even worse with the Turks called in to help their Muslim neighbours. At best, these were men to be tolerated and treated with suspicion, rather than wholeheartedly welcomed. At worst, the local Arab population saw them as little better than the enemies they were brought in to fight...It may seem counterintuitive, but the real problem of the crusades was not religion.
Steppe mercenaries were, in many ways, a general’s dream. Granted, discipline might be a problem; but these were hard men and, with the right leadership, they could be almost seamlessly turned into a voracious and formidable military machine... What the vast majority had in common, however, was that they, like so many of the soldiers fighting in the period of the crusades, were young foreigners. Even when fully employed, they were hard to handle. But they were always borderline criminals – men who were armed, drifting and looking for any opportunity they could grasp.
It was young men. Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality. The reason they caused such problems was not that they might be over-entitled, over-sexed or over-opinionated about religion – though they were often all of those things. The ultimate cause, and the ultimate reason why these men were the driver of the chaos that engulfed the medieval Middle East, was far more basic – and it was demographic and anthropological, rather than theological.
Criminality was rife in the medieval crusader states and their neighbours. It was fundamentally driven by two interconnected factors. One was the over-abundance of young (and often armed) men in the population. The other was the way in which these men were so strangely disengaged from the societies in which they found themselves.
But why was that? Why was there such a disproportionate level of testosterone in the air? After all, most medieval societies were at war for long periods of time – but very few experienced the levels of violence and criminality seen in the Middle East of the crusades. And why were these men so problematic? Unruly and underemployed soldiers were always disruptive, but rarely on such a scale. Clearly, something was very different. And for this difference to be sustained for two centuries, the reason had to be systemic, rather than anything more coincidental.
Above all, why were there so many young and dislocated men in the region?
The first trigger was climate change. Deteriorating weather conditions impacted upon the nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes. And that caused the second problem: unco
ntrolled mass migration. The nomadic tribes entered the Middle East in force and all the local sedentary societies did their best to fight back.
An arms race had begun in earnest. In a pre-industrial age, that race inevitably found its pr
imary expression in the acquisition of warm bodies. Everyone made a dash to attract as many potential out-of-region recruits as possible – and that process ground on for two centuries.
As these were truly international wars, they drew in troops from absurd distances – European troops (including crusaders) from as far west as the Atlantic coast of Ireland; soldier-slaves from sub-Saharan Africa; or steppe cavalry from central Asia and the Silk Roads. All were welcome. All were useful. And all were grist to the unremitting mill of blood and violence.
The proportion of young, armed men in the region inevitably shot up – and that was doubly jarring, because the civil population had previously been so largely demilitarised. But these men were not just there in huge numbers: they were generally foreigners, with very different customs, and as such were culturally desensitised. These were men both simultaneously alienated and yet strangely liberated. With this new and unstable population in place, levels of violence soared and remained spectacularly high – even by the standards of a region noted for its enduring lawlessness.
A chaotic and supremely dangerous crime wave was coming into its own.
The Page 99 Test: Templars.
--Marshal Zeringue
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