Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land

The crusades sparked centuries of violence and chaos – and not just on the battlefield. Steve Tibble describes the surge in criminality – from petty theft to cold-blooded murder – that accompanied the warring armies to the Holy Land

A crusader army led by French king Louis IX clashes with Ayyubid forces at Mansurah in 1250. Two centuries of warfare across the Middle East “drew a torrent of often dangerous young men into the region”, writes Steve Tibble. (Photo by Getty Images)

Published: July 16, 2024 at 5:10 PM

Save

Modern statesmen live in the expectation of a metaphorical knife in the back from their political enemies. The situation in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was similar, but the knives were far less metaphorical. Miles of Plancy, a powerful nobleman, was not popular with his peers. He could be rude. He could be arrogant. But his main failing, in the eyes of his fellow nobles at least, was that he was far too successful.

Ad

Miles stepped in to become regent in July 1174, after King Amalric – who had ruled the crusader state since 1163 – died unexpectedly. Miles’s elevation to one of the most important roles in all of the Christian Levant was unwelcome to the older families. He was warned that conspiracies were in train. But instead of taking a more conciliatory stance, Miles appears to have made light of it.

Events moved far more quickly than Miles expected, however. One day, “while staying at the city of Acre, he was stabbed on the public street just at dusk”, so William of Tyre, the famous chronicler of the crusades, tells us, and “died after suffering ignominious and shameful treatment”.

The murder was ruthlessly carried out and the assassin was probably on a ship back to France or Italy within the hour. The brutal world of crusader politics moved on without skipping a beat.

The real problem of the crusades was not religion – it was dislocated, disinhibited young men, arriving in large numbers

Bishop William of Acre appears to have made far fewer enemies than the ambitious Miles of Plancy. But that didn’t prevent him from meeting a similarly grisly fate two years earlier, in 1172.

After hearing blood-curdling cries, William’s servants had broken into his room in the Byzantine city of Adrian- ople to discover his butchered body. An assailant had slashed at the highly respected bishop while he rested and recovered from his long, exhausting travels.

It was an astonishing episode. Although it occurred during the crusades, William was a member of a peaceful mission travelling through the Byzantine empire, deep inside Christian territory. His was a diplomatic corps of unassuming mediators – priests going about their business. Violence was the last thing they expected. Even more astonishingly, as we’ll see, the killing had been perpetrated by one of their own.

Yet perhaps William’s party should have been accustomed to such bloodshed, because they were living in a region swamped by wave after wave of often violent crime.

Existential threat

By the time of the attack on Bishop William, the long, episodic fight for the Holy Land that followed the launch of the First Crusade in 1096 had been raging intermittently for three-quarters of a century, and was reaching a bloody crescendo. A Kurdish general named Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – better known to the crusaders and to posterity as Saladin – had taken Egypt, in the process gaining control of great wealth and large numbers of mercenaries. He now posed an existential threat to the crusader states established across the region.

In 1171, these Christian states launched a flurry of diplomatic activity, seeking allies who could help them face this new danger. Bishop William of Acre and his small team of negotiators and household servants were part of this charm offensive. By June 1172, they had been travelling on the punishing roads of the eastern Mediterranean and the Byzantine empire for more than a year.

The gruelling mission had taken a heavy toll on everyone in the party, but had proved particularly hard on one young man, a valued member of Bishop William’s household named Brother Robert. He seems to have had a breakdown of some kind, brought on by stress and the seemingly unending rigours of their journey.

So the group stopped at the city of Adrianople (now Edirne, far north-west Turkey) on their way back to the Byzantine court in Constantinople. There they rested, hoping that Brother Robert would recover enough to be able to continue the journey. Sadly, the opposite hap- pened. It seems that Robert experienced a psychotic episode, sparking a bout of inexplicable violence. While his companions were asleep, wrote William of Tyre, “suddenly a madness came upon him; he seized his sword and stabbed the sleeping bishop, inflicting fatal wounds”. The attack was over within seconds, leaving the bishop fatally wounded.

The dying man didn’t, though, call for revenge to be meted out to the young priest. Instead, he insisted that Robert be treated gently. The assailant was clearly not responsible for his actions, William recognised. Yet that defence wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny for the majority of crimes committed across the region – and there were many. We think of the crusades as a succession of campaigns in which violent attacks on Muslim-held targets in the Middle East were met with violent resistance – a bloody clash of ideologies and faiths. But the real problem of the crusades was not religion – it was young men. Dislocated, disinhibited young men, arriving in disturbingly large numbers. This tsunami of youth was the propellant that fuelled two centuries of warfare and shocking levels of criminality.

Co-opting criminals

The myriad of anecdotes that I discovered while researching my new book, Crusader Criminals, suggests that a massive, and largely untold, increase in crime took place at this time. And this crusader crimewave was shaped by three principal – and surprisingly modern – factors: migration, male entitlement and climate change.
In the decades before the launch of the First Crusade, the climate in the eastern Mediterranean and western Eurasian steppes became unstable, frequently causing unusually cold and unusually hot spells, typically accompanied by famines or droughts. The nomadic Turkic tribes of the western Eurasian steppes were hit particularly hard. Unlike sedentary societies, they maintained limited food reserves, so their only response
to a sudden famine was to move away.

This was the first major wave of migration to consider in this story: the movement of a loose confederation of Seljuk Turkic warbands into the Middle East in the second half of the 11th century. These nomadic tribes were recent converts to Sunni Islam, but most had little interest in theology. They attacked settled communities, fighting Christians and Muslims alike, and took what they wanted. By the 1080s, these steppe war- lords had taken much of Byzantine Anatolia and Palestine, plus most of the Arab Syrian city-states.

The Byzantine empire called on the Christian powers of western Europe for help, sparking the expedition
that became known as the First Crusade – the second pivotal migration. Following a succession of military victories, including the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, some of the crusaders established colonies in the region – polities that later became known as the ‘crusader states’. That was, of course, far from the end of the conflict. Two centuries of war followed, fuelling an ongoing recruitment drive for young mercenaries and other long-distance recruits to bolster both Christian and Muslim forces, drawing a torrent of often dangerous men into the region. The incidence of violence soared – and remained spectacularly high, even by the standards of a region noted for its lawlessness, resulting in widespread chaos and social upheaval.

That’s unsurprising when you look at the kind of men being recruited. Consider this episode of 1248, during
the French king Louis IX’s preparations for what became known as the Seventh Crusade, recounted by the chronicler Jean de Joinville.

“As I was on my way to Paris,” wrote Jean, “I came across three dead men on a cart whom a clerk [a trainee priest] had killed, and I was told... that the men were three [policemen]” who had set out to rob local people.

On encountering the young priest, they “stripped him of all his clothes. The clerk, wearing only his chemise, went to his lodgings and took up his crossbow.” He also got hold of his falchion – a short, hefty sword with a broad, curved blade, like a machete. Chasing his assailants, he “drew his crossbow, fired and struck one of them in the heart. The other two took flight, while the clerk took up the falchion... and chased them by the light of the moon, which was bright and clear.”

Crime wasn’t just tolerated and its perpetrators recruited to the crusaders’ cause – it was sometimes even nurtured

The angry clerk struck one fleeing man with his sword “and cut right through his leg so that only the boot [was] holding it on”. He then struck the other’s head with his falchion, splitting his skull down to the teeth.

The king recognised a useful man when he saw one. With ecclesiastical employment now unlikely to be an option for the triple killer, Louis gave the clerk the opportunity to make a radical career change. The church’s loss was the Seventh Crusade’s gain.

To catch a thief

Crime wasn’t just tolerated and its perpetrators recruited to the crusaders’ cause – it was even nurtured by some in the ‘wild east’ of the medieval Holy Land.

When Jean de Joinville was on crusade in the 1250s, he discovered a theft. “I asked my new servant, Guillemin, to show me his accounts, which he did,” Jean later wrote. “I found that he had cheated me out of a good 10 livres or more... I dismissed him and told him I would give him what he owed me, since he had certainly earned it.”
A curious reaction? Perhaps Jean’s later discoveries – and his own actions – explain his leniency.

It transpired that Guillemin already had an extensive criminal record. Speaking later to his servant’s previous employers, a band of Burgundian knights, Jean “learned from them that they had brought Guillemin overseas in their company, and that he was the most obliging thief that there ever was”. Indeed, he often pilfered things on their orders: “Whenever a knight was in need of gloves or spurs or anything else,” they told Jean, “Guillemin would go and steal it and then give it to him.”

Was Jean, too, party to some of Guillemin’s criminal activities? Or did his servant know things about Jean that he’d prefer left untold? We know, for instance, that Guillemin had found lodgings for them conveniently – perhaps suspiciously – close to the sex workers and bath-houses of Acre. Was that at his master’s request? And did Jean avail himself of these facilities? We don’t know – but it’s clear that, even at the highest echelons of crusading societies, crime was pervasive.

Multi-ethnic murder

Crime in the region wasn’t confined to theft. Bloodshed, fuelled by demographic imbalance, testosterone and cultural disinhibition, was endemic among the crusaders and their enemies in the region.

An episode involving Zengi, the powerful 12th-century Turkic ruler of Mosul (now in Iraq) – an opponent of the crusaders whose family had been part of that wave of migration from the steppes – was just one of thousands
of examples of wanton violence.

Zengi had a predilection for murder, violence and rape, and a preference for young men. From the outset of his rule, it was said that “when he was unhappy with an amir, he would kill him... and leave that individual’s children alive but castrate them. Whenever one of his pages pleased him by his beauty he would treat him in the same way so that the characteristics of youth would last longer in him.”

Zengi’s sleeping arrangements reflected these tastes.

“A few of his servants sleep around his bed,” wrote one chronicler. “He loves them as they love him and, despite their loyalty to him, he is sometimes harsh with them. They are the children of the... Turkish, Armenian and Byzantine lords.”

The First Crusade

Explore the First Crusade with our in-depth podcast series,nwith contributions from Steve Tibble among others. Listen now

His rule – and his life – was ended at the hands of one of those beautiful but mutilated pages. On the night of 14 September 1146, Zengi had, as usual, been drinking heavily. He slumped into a stupor and woke to find his servants, led by a Frankish slave named Yaranqash, finishing his fine wines.

Enraged, Zengi made the mistake of telling his prisoner-lover that he was going to have him killed in the morning. The Frankish eunuch, presumably also drunk, responded by killing his master and – in a final act that speaks to the high emotions involved – beheaded him for good measure.

On one level, this dramatic incident seems lurid but perhaps not too unusual. Yet consider: who were the people involved? The answer highlights the issues at the heart of the crusader crimewave.

First, everyone was male and, apart from Zengi himself, they were all young. Importantly, all were also foreigners or relatively recent arrivals. Zengi was a Turk of steppe heritage, while his assassin was said to be of European ethnicity. Others present were Byzantine or Armenians, displaced by the Turkic invasions of the preceding decades. None were Arab.

Similarly, religion wasn’t a prominent factor in anyone’s actions or motives. Zengi was – nominally, at least – a Sunni Muslim, but his predilection for alcohol and mutilated slave boys suggests a less-than-orthodox approach to observance. Many, perhaps the majority, of his young lovers seem to have been from a Christian back- ground. So the diverse origins of the people involved was a consequence of demographic forces particular to this time and place: lots of young men detached from their families and the countries of their birth.

The two centuries of conflict in the Middle East known today as the crusades sucked in a huge number of
often violent young men, armed and adrift, who were let loose in the Holy Land, with profoundly scarring
effects on the region. War was the most visible consequence of these forces – but criminality and pervasive civil violence were just as prevalent, and arguably even more fundamentally destructive.

Tide of crime

Shiploads of men, including merchants and mercenaries, turned to piracy in the eastern Mediterranean

As well as driving the incidence of violence and theft on land, the deluge of young men surging into the Middle East also coincided with a rise in crime at sea. Vast numbers of ships, sailors and naval entrepreneurs were drawn to the region. Crusader pirates did not feature heavily in the chronicles of the time, but evidence shows that they were always there in the background, often operating in large numbers. In medieval times, piracy was part of a ‘portfolio career’ long before anyone thought of such first-world issues as early retirement or the gig economy. In the Latin East, it was treated with a huge dose of pragmatism. Largely unfettered by legal frameworks, a medieval pirate was, in most instances, simply someone with a ship and an opportunity. Such an opportunity might attract men from every walk of life. Take Godric of Finchale (c1070–1170), the English ship’s captain and venture capitalist who saved the life of King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, carrying him safely to Jaffa after defeat by Egyptian forces at Ramla in 1102 – thus influencing the course of cru- sading history. He later became a hermit monk, and even found time to write the lyrics to the earliest known English-language songs surviving with their original melodies. But he’s also equated to a pirate named Godric who operated in the eastern Mediterranean at that time. Some men arriving as crusaders engaged in slave-trading: one such was William Jiba, who operated out of Acre in the early 1140s and who was renowned for his cruelty. Even one of his customers called him “a real devil of a Frank”. There are even tales of crusading Viking pirate-knights who boasted that, en route to the Holy Land, they had landed on the north African coast to “shoot at the lions as they were spurring their horses on as hard as they could”. It’s a story so strange that it’s probably true.

Steve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. His new book is Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land (Yale University Press), published in July

Ad

This article was first published in the August 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...