The Last Full Measure (12 page)

THE CRUSADES WERE
a clash not only of religious ideologies (a writhing bag of snakes would have been easier to deal with) but also of tactical ideologies. Christian and Muslim warriors had been shaped by different traditions. The mounted knight sought to bring the matter to the point of decision by a trial of personal arms at close quarters, and his supporting troops—infantry and crossbowmen—were just that: a support that set up the possibility of the decisive charge. Islamic warriors, whose tactical antecedents were from Asiatic raiders, were rarely committed to an all-out charge unless, due to prior softening up by missile weapons, the enemy appeared to be terminally vulnerable. The horse bowmen, like those Parthians who had destroyed the Roman legions at Carrhae in 53 BCE, were still one of the most important elements of Saracen combat. The horse was, of course, one important element that Christian and Muslim shared, but it was used in strikingly different ways. To put it schematically, the Muslim warrior used his horse as a weapons platform, whereas the knight used it as a weapon; the one stood off and fired his arrows, the other sought to make physical contact. An effective cavalry charge relied on a collective and concentrated weight to destroy the enemy. It demanded cohesion and discipline. The problem, however, was that as it got under way, the vagaries of terrain and the individual horse and rider caused it to destabilize and disintegrate, and many knights were killed in the ensuing counterattack, unable to get back to the shelter of the infantry (a similar problem faced by tanks many centuries later).

In the early phases of the Crusades, the Christians’ reliance on heavy cavalry cost them dearly. Using tactics not unlike those of the nineteenth-century Plains Indians, Saracen horse bowmen swept around the invading armies, shooting down men and mounts, only to melt away when the Christian cavalry sallied out to engage. If, however, the Saracens, in their initial missile phase,
managed to uncover a weak spot, in went the heavier lance-armed cavalry, to be followed by infantry support.

The
Itinerarium
, a chronicle of Richard Lionheart’s Third Crusade, describes the frustration of the Crusaders before the battle of Arsuf in 1191 as the Muslim horsemen, “keeping alongside our army as it advanced, struggled to inflict what it could upon us, firing darts and arrows which flew very thickly, like rain. Alas! Many horses fell dead transfixed with missiles, many were gravely wounded and died much later! You would have seen such a great downpour of darts and arrows that where the army passed through you could not have found a space of four foot of ground without shafts stuck in it.”
³²
However, it says something about the relative lethality of the Asiatic bow compared with the longbow that many a Christian foot soldier managed to weather the storm. The Islamic chronicler Bahā-al-Din, Saladin’s secretary, describes the Christian foot, protected by their thick quilted jackets (
gambesons
) and mail shirts (
hauberks
): “I noted among them men who had from one to ten shafts sticking in their backs, yet trudged on at their ordinary pace and did not fall out of their ranks.… The Muslims sent in volleys of arrows from all sides, endeavoring to irritate the knights and to worry them into leaving their ramparts of infantry. But it was all in vain.”
³³

On the other side, Crusader crossbowmen were effective and feared. Protected by pikemen from the predations of Muslim light cavalry, they inflicted significant casualties. Although it was contrary to Muslim law, captured crossbowmen stood a good chance of being massacred.
³⁴
(Ironically, Richard himself would die from gangrene caused by a crossbow bolt wound in the shoulder at the siege of Châlus, a relatively insignificant little castle near Limoges, France, in 1199—and thus, “the Lion by the Ant was slain.”)

If the Muslims favored fluidity and opportunistic attack, the Europeans valued cohesion, organization, and discipline (not
always so easily achieved when restraint was challenged by the hair trigger of chivalric hubris). The Christians had to prevent their opponents from breaking down their
solidus inter se conglobati
—meaning, in tactical terms, sticking together (literally, “coagulating”). Maintaining cohesion on the march was paramount, for when they allowed themselves to be “cut out” into smaller units—as they were, for example, at the battle of Hattin in 1187—the Christians were usually, and emphatically, done to death.
³⁵
To prevent this unhappy outcome, Crusader columns had to fashion themselves into forts-on-the-hoof; the cavalry sheltered within the protective walls of pikemen and crossbowmen, who worked in tandem to keep the Muslim horse at bay. Richard Lionheart, on the Third Crusade (1189–92), had his front rank of pikemen, each protected by his shield and shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades, kneel, presenting his grounded pike toward the Saracen cavalry. Behind them were pairs of crossbowmen, one loading and the other firing.

Richard was also masterful at shepherding his flock as it slowly progressed along the coast of Palestine, the knights on the seaward side, protected by infantry and archers on the exposed landward flank. At Arsuf the Christian chivalry had a rare chance to break out and run down their attackers. Ironically, Richard I’s victory was to some extent due to a breakdown in the very discipline he had tried so hard to maintain. He was forced to support an unauthorized attack by the Knights Hospitallers and in the series of ensuing charges scattered and eventually destroyed Saladin’s army. For the Muslims, their deaths were also a result of either failing or being prevented from exercising their crucial tactical advantage: mobility. And once caught, they were enthusiastically dispatched. Contemporaries record that the field was bloodily strewn with seven thousand bodies.

GUNPOWDER WAS FIRST
used in China, where the earliest written formula for it dates from 1044. It was then adopted by the Muslim world, where it was known, poetically, as “Chinese snow.”
³⁶
The English-speaking world had an altogether more blunt-nosed word for it.
Gun
is first used in an English text in 1339, and a new era of battlefield lethality was born.
³⁷

I
T IS IRONIC
that the warfare of rationality—that is, a way of destroying warriors not with the crude slash and shove of muscle and steel but with the application of science and invention, of formulae and calculation—should have one foot in a pile of ordure. Warfare in the “Modern Age” is based on piss and shit.

One of the primary ingredients of gunpowder—saltpeter (potassium nitrate)—is a by-product of the bacterial decay of organic matter, particularly dung and urine. In the fourteenth century, gunpowder manufacturers in Europe were attempting
to set themselves up as a self-sustaining industry independent of importation, not unlike our nervous dependence on foreign oil.
¹
Saltpeter “farms” were established in Europe, and by the 1420s it was half the price it had been only fifty years earlier. England was an important center because the English were renowned as redoubtable boozers (a reputation they seem to have enthusiastically sustained over the centuries) and therefore famously productive in the elimination of highly ammoniac urine. Bert S. Hall puts it in scientific language: “Urine from wine and beers is based on the fact that ammonia levels in the urine increase dramatically as the body metabolizes alcohol.… A heavy drinker’s urine contributes more vitally needed NH4 to the heap than does an abstemious person.”
²
Saltpeter forms naturally in warm climates with a regular dry season that dries out the urine-soaked earth, leaving nitrous salts. Until sources were found in Chile, most saltpeter came from India, collected from “the bottoms of the tanks or shallow ponds of water, which, in this country, are often of great extent, where the water being evaporated by the heat of the sun, large quantities of filth are left to corrupt, which furnishes a mud of strongest nitrous quality.”

In 1561 Gerard Honrick, a German who had established a saltpeter business in England, recommended “black earth” (composted human fecal matter and dung from horses fed on oats), urine (“namely of those persons whiche drink either wyne or strong bears [
sic
]”), and two kinds of lime. The mixture was to be kept in a dry environment and turned, like a compost heap, at least once a year. It took about a year for the bacteriological process to make the snowlike deposit that was saltpeter.
³

Robert Norton writes in 1628 that gunpowder “is compounded of three Principles, or Elements, Saltpetre, Sulpher and Cole, whereof Saltpetre is it that gives the chiefest violence.”
⁴
The approximate relative quantities of these ingredients are 75 percent saltpeter, 10 percent sulphur, and 15 percent carbon (usually
charcoal powder), a mixture that will burn at 2,100–2,700°C. The expanding gases (274–360 cubic centimeters per gram of gunpowder), if confined in a tube, will explode a closed tube to create a bomb or, if the tube is open at one end, propel a ball, or, in the very earliest manifestations of the gun, a dart.
⁵
The problem for the makers and users of early firearms (Edward III had three small cannons at the battle of Crécy in 1346) was that large-grained gunpowder burned at a slower rate than a finer-milled grain and produced less force (it seems counterintuitive, but in fact small grains have a larger surface area, in proportion to their mass, than large ones and therefore burn faster). But if gunners used too fine a grain, the expanding gases could well burst their weapons faster than the projectile could respond by exiting the gun and thus relieving the pressure. This was not too much of a problem in hand arms that used relatively small amounts of powder but was certainly a risk for artillery pieces. James II of Scotland, for example, was killed by an exploding cannon during his siege of Roxburgh Castle in 1460. A piece of the weapon smashed his thigh and he “died hastily.”

Apart from being prone to damp, the constituent elements of gunpowder tend to separate out after mixing. Early gunpowder manufacturers overcame this by “corning” (from the Old English for “seed”
—corn
—as in
peppercorn
), wetting the powder (vinegar, wine, and urine were often used) to make a paste, from which pellets were formed and dried. The aggregate had less surface area and therefore did not absorb as much atmospheric moisture. It was easier to store, lasted longer, and became ballistically more potent. Before use, the pellets could be crushed into particles. If they were ground too finely, there would not be enough space between the grains to provide sufficient oxygen for maximal burn; too coarse, and the powder burned too slowly.