Crusader Armies by Steve Tibble

Author:Steve Tibble
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300218145
Publisher: Yale University Press

Galilee

The rot had set in, and no one was immune. Having captured Banyas in 1164, Nur al-Din launched another major attack through the County of Tripoli and down into the north of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1166–7. While the Frankish field army was campaigning in Egypt, his forces:

assembled at Homs and then Nur al-Din took his troops into Frankish territory. They passed by [Crac des Chevaliers] and carried out plundering raids. They made for ‘Arqa and put it under siege. They also besieged Halba [a crusader castle inland from the port of Tripoli] which they took and destroyed. They took [Arima] and [Chastel Blanc, further north and inland from Tortosa] and then returned to Homs.140

With barely a pause, he took his troops south and they ‘marched to attack the fortress of [Chastel Neuf] which was held by the Franks, one of their most impregnable fortresses and castles. The Franks fled and set fire to it. The day after that Nur al-Din arrived and razed its walls completely.’141

It was dissent and exhaustion among his own men, rather than intervention by Christian troops, that eventually forced Nur al-Din to bring his campaign to a halt. Even the Hospitaller forces at Crac des Chevaliers had just hunkered down behind their walls and let the invaders do their worst to the surrounding countryside and more vulnerable castles. Muslim troops did not occupy Chastel Neuf but the destruction was thorough.142 Nur al-Din’s campaign of 1167 was both the death knell for the ‘phase two’ castles and the impetus for the design of the new concentric castle.

It is one thing to know what needs to be done. It is quite another to have the money and manpower to do it, however. The king and his nobles could cope with small upgrades of existing castles in the interior, but they could not cope with the massive rebuilding programmes that were becoming increasingly essential for the frontiers. As the external balance of power shifted more in favour of the Muslim states, so too the internal balance of power shifted away from the local Frankish rulers and their nobles, and over to the military orders, with all the leverage that came from their access to pan-European resources. The task of building and manning the next generation of castles was increasingly entrusted to the Hospitallers and Templars.143

With the Frankish field army on campaign in Egypt for much of the 1160s, every weakness of the ‘phase two’ castles could be exploited at leisure, and their enemies were increasingly well equipped to do so. The growing geopolitical isolation of the crusader states meant that their armies were frequently fighting on several fronts at the same time and with predictable results. Relief forces took longer to muster and to arrive, and shifted the whole balance of advantage away from the small Frankish garrisons and onto the increasingly large Muslim besieging forces.

Earlier castles were designed on the assumption that relief by a field army could be anticipated within a week or ten days.

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