They could also be wearing double riveted mail, which offered a bit extra protection against arrows at the cost of much more weight. Imagine how they felt wearing 50 lbs of weight under scorching sun. They were also fighting and sweating etc.. Maybe that's why the crusaders were so inefficient and lost. In the desert or any hot and arid regions, I would trade protection for mobility anyday. It's just a smarter choice.
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Can we do something about the khuzaits?
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Armour in the Levant and in Syria during the early crusades was a mixture of lamellar and mail with gambesons. It probably wouldn't have been functionally different to what the crusaders were wearing, minus the lamellar. I think often too much emphasis is placed on the equipment differences between the crusaders and their enemies, when most of the crusader battles were still mostly mailed infantry vs mailed infantry, and the locally levied infantrymen who lived in the crusader states (but would have been of Frankish origin) would have been nigh indistinguishable from the infantry the muslims were using.
I really don't get your clear bias in this matter, and the constant need to present the crusaders and their achievements as less than they were.
Anyway, another possibility is that the very mentioned "vest from THICK felt," something that the locals might not use due to the very climate they were accustomed to (but was a viable development for use in colder Europe) was crucial for the greater arrow-stoping capacity reported.
If it helps you, there are also several specific accounts of crusaders getting hit by arrows going through both shield and mail, so the above was also highly likely the result of weaker bows in general use among "regular" troops. Then again, we also know that the same man who rammed a lance through a crusader's body that it extended "a cubit" outside the OTHER layer (basically skewered him back to front - bonus WTF moment, the crusader survived it) also failed to penetrate a frankish mail in another lance charge, so there was a clear difference in mail quality in use, if not simply vagaries of realRNG (it's early, I don't feel like looking up the name - Usamah something, and since I went through several books yesterday when I skimmed over that one can't drop the source, but shouldn't be difficult to find).
That source is from Usama Ibn Munqidh and I referenced it earlier in the thread. I can't find any online direct quotes from that incident, but (I think) it's mentioned in this article:
Warfare during the Crusades: Usama ibn Munqidh and his Memoirs
Some of the most useful sources on medieval warfare are the ones written by the warriors themselves.
www.medievalists.net
We have to remember that Usamah was basically a medieval boomer and some of the stuff he recounts is extremely dubious. Often his source is "some guy I met once", usually Mamluks or other Faris who would have had every reason to pump themselves up in stories. He was essentially writing a comedy memoir.
Thanks for the lead
Though in case of "lance against mail," there's a Byzantine account (and I'm scrambling to remember the details) of - I think - one of the emperors getting hit by charging lancers from both sides, and not getting injured or having their mail penetrated. Don't know the reputation of Usamah (doesn't strike me as anything particularly outstanding from western accounts, to be honest, and their own problems with reliability), and certainly don't remember the Byzantine source, but I do have a vague memory of several anecdotes from various "crusader" sources when it comes to people walking off a lance hit, so combined with information from modern tests against the armor it seems a pretty plausible, if unlikely an event.
I agree, I definitely think he was telling the truth about the armour basically blocking direct lance hits, I was referring more to the thing where he describes a lance basically going through someone, when it was more likely a glancing hit out the side or something. I'm just a bit wary of using his secondary I-heard-this information as evidence of anything specific.
Sidenote only:
Opposite, The almost mythically acclaimed steel of that period was (for good reasons, but contemporaries didn't have a name for (or probably concept of) martenzite) Damascen steel, a broad term for Indian Wootz steel items that Europeans knew only via Damascus products.
If you like metallurgy and history, looking up wootz steel on scholar.google can find a bunch of great articles on it, as people like attempting to backwards engineer it, and ie in XVII/XVIII-XIX c. Ruś (region overlapping Russia, Belarus, Ukraine/Poland (at the time) they again glorified it and still couldn't reproduce similar effects, and imported it from ~Turkmenistan direction.
Wootz steel is real life magic, a physical manifestation of engineering knowledge, genius and immense luck that's haunted engineers for centuries,
en.wikipedia.org
Opposite, The almost mythically acclaimed steel of that period was (for good reasons, but contemporaries didn't have a name for (or probably concept of) martenzite) Damascen steel, a broad term for Indian Wootz steel items that Europeans knew only via Damascus products.
If you like metallurgy and history, looking up wootz steel on scholar.google can find a bunch of great articles on it, as people like attempting to backwards engineer it, and ie in XVII/XVIII-XIX c. Ruś (region overlapping Russia, Belarus, Ukraine/Poland (at the time) they again glorified it and still couldn't reproduce similar effects, and imported it from ~Turkmenistan direction.
Wootz steel is real life magic, a physical manifestation of engineering knowledge, genius and immense luck that's haunted engineers for centuries,
Damascus steel - Wikipedia
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Khuzaits go brrrrr PEW PEW, take clay
I'm not biased...... wearing thick armor in the desert is not a smart choice. They needed a constant supply of water to not become dehydrated. The Kurdish general Saladin exploited this weakness to win the battle of Hattin. They should have adapted to the environment that they were fighting in. Crusaders had some great victories, but if they were smarter, maybe they could've secured the holy land....
Of course I know Damascus steel, but my limited knowledge on metallurgy tells me that Damascus steel only look pretty, and many expensive daggers nowadays are made from Damascus. They are more for art display than actual battles. I don't believe that muslim soldiers were wearing mail made from Damascus steel back then. They were expensive and perform worse than normal steel for battle.
>"The crusaders lost because they were somehow too stupid to realise that being hot makes you thirsty"
bruh
A lot of the crusader soldiers at hattin were born in syria / palestine, would have worn turbans in battle and probably spoken arabic. They knew more about the heat than either of us. Even if they weren't, the crusaders would have had fractional IQs if they couldn't adaot to the climate. If they wore armour there was a good reason.
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You need a source of water, regardless of if you wear armor or not, in a desert. That's why so many battles happened in and around oases even with forces that were wearing nothing heavier than an abbreviated lamellar cuirass.
I have to step in and say you're completely wrong about just about everything you've said here. They did adapt to the environment - the desert is a dry heat and it's no coincidence that during and after the Crusades, long flowy surcoats and cloth coverings over armour were popular choices. These were very practical adaptations to the desert sun.
Seems many here do not know that both the Templar Knights and the Hospitallers formed in the mid-east from those living there. They knew how to fight and survive there which is why there were there for 100s of years. The whole "crusades failed because of armor = hot =thirsty = dead" only applies to the first Crusade...And that the armor worn by those under Musta'sim and other Caliphs of the time were not so great due to the simple fact that Mongolian archers were felling them so easily.
Anyone attempting to say that their armor could deflect a lance needs to take a look at how easily the Mongolian bow could shoot an arrow that could pierce their armor. hey look, something on topic since this thread is bout the Khuzaits!
The Crusades failed because they were forces 1000 miles from their homes, that did not fully throw their power into what they were doing AND the conflict between Catholics and the Byzantine causing them not to be unified. The odds they could succeed were low from the start.
Anyone attempting to say that their armor could deflect a lance needs to take a look at how easily the Mongolian bow could shoot an arrow that could pierce their armor. hey look, something on topic since this thread is bout the Khuzaits!
The Crusades failed because they were forces 1000 miles from their homes, that did not fully throw their power into what they were doing AND the conflict between Catholics and the Byzantine causing them not to be unified. The odds they could succeed were low from the start.
imma need some source for that, brochocho. That sounds extremely dubious. Agree with the rest of your post though.
Mongol campaign against the Nizaris - Wikipedia
Actual testing of the Mongolian Composite verses armor.
Mongol campaign against the Nizaris - Wikipedia
Actual testing of the Mongolian Composite verses armor.
Nowhere in the first video does it mention that the armour of the Khwarezmians was constantly pierced by mongol archers or that this was the reason that they lost. Also I have no idea what the Khwarezmians or Nizaris have to do with the Crusades.
The second video is from a series with notoriously poor methodology, like using unpadded armour or chainmail directly against ballistic gel. The whole point of that show is to hype stuff up. The bows the mongols used were virtually identical to Turkic bows which had been in Iran, Iraq and Syria / Palestine for about 250 years before they arrived. Mongol tactics were standard steppe warfare where the arrows are there to disorganise and demoralise the enemy rather than actually kill them, which is why mongol armies had massive contingents of lancer cavalry.
The Abbasids were conquered by the Mongols because their empire had been in decline for hundreds of years and Iraq was depopulated, not because they had bad equipment. When the Mongols faced the Mamluks (who were actual enemies of the crusaders, unlike the Khwarezmians) they were defeated again and again.
Ok, its clear you do not know anything about this topic.
The campaign in my first link took place from 1253-1270, the same time frame as the last 3 crusades. And yes actually, the 2 videos DO mention what you claim they do not.
Both sides fielded their armies and the Islamic armies were crushed on the field from Mongolian calvary which all had composite bows. The how is implied. Just because there were no historians taking part in the battle to see with their own eyes how the arrows killed people, does not mean it did not happen. All of history shows that the Mongolians crushed their enemies because of their extreme mobility and crushing rain of arrows...but we are supposed to believe it was not the case with Middle Eastern battles, because "armor"?!?
The onus is on you my friend to prove it did not happen because you, cannot find anything in the history books that state the Mogolians had to defeat them differently than everyone else.
I have a degree in Islamic History with a focus on the Crusades and the Mongols.
Yes, and also separated by well over 3000 kilometres, and completely different culturally and even religiously to anyone the crusaders ever fought. The crusader states were geographically closer to Finland than to the part of the Khwarezmian Empire that the Mongols invaded.
Timestamp pls, because I watched the entire video and nothing like that is ever implied.
No it's not. About 1/3 to 1/2 of mongol soldiers were not horse archers. It is generally accepted by modern historians that horse archers didn't do much killing on their own and couldn't win battles without heavy cavalry support, because there is no evidence of any battle where unsupported horse archers could defeat an enemy. There are also plenty of examples of armies firing literally millions of arrows at an army like at Carrhae or the march of Richard I south towards Jerusalem in 1191, but staying completely intact until the heavy cavalry arrived. Horse archers in video games were nothing like they were in real life.
You sure this had nothing to do with Mongols superior tactics, and combined arms approach that allowed their heavy cavalry to reach and break the formations that their mounted archers could not disperse one way or another? Because no, they did not all use bows, and heavy mongolian lancers are a constant fixture of their battlefields.
I mean, the whole logistical side of things completely aside.
Edit: Hah, ninja'd by James in a much more detailed way. Yeah, I know who my money is on in terms of genuine knowledgability in this exchange.
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