Crusader knights lived on the move, which may explain why no camps have ever been found. Now one has, and now we know how the soldiers whiled away their time while waiting for war
And it came to pass that on the night of
July 2, 1187, the knights of the Kingdom of Jerusalem fought bitterly –
with each other. They were arguing over whether to march onto Tiberias
to regain it from Saladin, whose Muslim forces had overrun the city the
day before, or to keep the troops for the nonce in camp by the bountiful
Springs of Saforie, aka Tzippori.
Sensibly,
the Crusaders tended to camp in the vicinity of a reliable source of
water, according to historical sources and horse sense, and
archaeologist Rafi Lewis. The question is what else was typical of
medieval Crusader camps, but we did not know because none had been
found, let alone archaeologically explored.
Now, for the first time a war camp intermittently used for over a century as Christendom and Islamic forces struggled over the Holy Land has been found, and archaeologically explored. The findings at the camp by the Tzippori springs shed light on what the soldiers would do while camping in wait for war – a tense period, to put it mildly.
Mainly,
the evidence indicates, the commanders would be squabbling, while the
rank and file would be distracted from the tensions not by drinking and
carousing but by replacing the iron nails in their horses’ shoes.
Anyway,
after that sleepless night in the command echelon, on July 3 the Franks
marched forth from Tzippori, whether heading for Tiberias itself or
possibly for the springs of Hattin – it was reportedly a blistering hot
day. On the morrow, July 4, they were crushed by the forces of the
Ayyubid Sultan Saladin in the Battle of Hattin.
The medieval camp at Tzippori was just 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Tiberias.
Over a century, both the Christian knights and the Ayyubid warriors
used the encampment site, explains Lewis, who researches the archaeology
of conflicts and landscape archaeology with the Ashkelon Academic
College and University of Haifa.
How
could it be that so much fighting between Christian and Islamic forces
during the medieval period produced no (known) encampments, until this
one? Maybe they were overlooked as researchers focused on more “popular”
sites such as castles and sites of siege warfare, Lewis suggests.
This
encampment was discovered thanks to a project led by the Prehistoric
Division of the Israel Antiquities Authority, directed by Nimrod Getzov
and Ianir Milevski, taking six years.
What they found was very different from Roman-style camps, as indicated by medieval sources in La Règle du Temple (Rule
of the Templars), describing what Crusader camps should look like and
how they should be organized. The camp is described in the third chapter
in the book “Settlement and Crusade in the Thirteenth Century.” Yet again, the archaeological gem was discovered because of roadworks. This happens a lot in Israel:
infrastructure works(or
burrowing animals) leading to historical enlightenment. Given that Israel has been the stomping ground for humanity and our predecessors for at least a couple of million years, that’s only natural. Thank you, bulldozers and
naked mole rats. - Advertisment -
But
this is the first material evidence of a medieval encampment site in
Israel or anywhere, really, Lewis says. That is in contrast to the
Romans who occupied the Holy Land a millennium or more before – Israel
and the Levant as a whole are littered with Roman remains.
A lovely place to wait
The
Springs of Saforie are a prolific water source in a small valley and,
to be clear, this lush area was occupied from prehistory. The
archaeologists unearthed superimposed settlements from the earliest
advent of sedentarism, the pre-pottery Neolithic; one of the biggest
known settlements associated with the Wadi Rabah culture 7,500 years
ago; and from the Early Bronze Age (about 5,000 years ago). - Advertisment -
The site housed a well-developed fortified settlement, enclosed by a thick stone wall. The Romans quarried stone at the spot. And come the medieval period, various troops would find it a comfortable parking place.
One
snag about investigating the Frankish camp is that it doesn’t seem to
have had stone and/or wood structures, unlike the earlier Roman Legion camps, which had both internal walls as well as outer walls marking the camp boundary.
The
impression left by the remains of the medieval encampment in Tzippori
is impermanence, Lewis says. Based on historical sources, Crusader
soldiers were housed in tents; even the camp church was in a tent. The
men were perennially ready to march for war, he explains.
So,
no walls, but the archaeologists found a wealth of metal artifacts
dating to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which existed from the year
1099 to 1291.
It
isn’t clear when the Christian forces began using the Tzippori camp,
but as of the 1130s this was a choice assembly point for armed forces,
Lewis says. He lists specific examples: In 1168, King Amaury wrote to
King Louis VII from the springs, asking for help following an earthquake
in Antioch. And clearly, the Franks camped there time and again until
the fateful Battle of Hattin in 1187. Then Saladin himself gathered his
troops at this bountiful spring.
All in all, Lewis sums up, it seems both Muslim and Frankish forces used the site over more than 125 years. To do what, though?
For want of a nail
Among
the metal artifacts found at the site were almost 200 dating to the
Kingdom of Jerusalem, including coins. The earliest of the coins found
at the site was a bronze coin struck in Tyre at the end of Trajan’s
reign and the latest (apart from the Crusader ones) was a Byzantine
bronze coin, of a type minted in huge numbers in Antioch by Constantine I
and following regimes, explain numismatists Robert Kool and Donald
Ariel from the IAA in a separate paper.
Some coins appear to postdate the young King Baldwin’s victory over his mother Queen Regent Melisande of Jerusalem, i.,e., they were minted after the year 1152.
And
there were a lot of horseshoe nails, relatively speaking, as well as
other items related to horses. These included shoes, bridles, pricks,
harness fittings, and a currycomb, as well as three needles and four
arrowheads.
Let
us dwell on the horseshoe nails. Back then, the nail heads were not
nailed to the hilt in the horseshoe, in order to better grip the ground,
the team explains. So obviously the nails would break and need frequent
replacing. This is all the more pertinent given that some of the people
at the camp had come from afar, even hundreds of kilometers.
“I
see an interesting pattern similar to that in contemporary army camps,”
says Lewis: the men are awaiting the fight and are meanwhile bored,
fearful and troublesome. In short, it is a dangerous situation and the
last thing their commanders want them to do is have the leisure to
think. And at Tzippori, a major activity seems to have been replacing
broken horseshoe nails, which went beyond make-work for its own sake.
“Most
of the nails we found were used ones,” Lewis explains. “It’s like, when
you go to war you don’t want a flat tire on your jeep. They came from
all over the place, some from Tyre, some from Ashkelon, and it would
have been a few days’ ride to Tzippori. The first thing to do is replace
the horseshoe nails.”
The domestication of the horse
apparently goes back about 5,500 years, and one wonders when horseshoes
were first invented. It seems that people began to protect equine feet
with leather or other “hipposandals”
in antiquity, and then the horseshoe may have arrived about 2,400 years
ago, going by bronze specimens with seeming holes for nails in an
Etruscan tomb in central Italy.
So
back to our question: what did the men do in the camp between wars? One
answer is, they reshoed their steeds and at least one good sirrah was
brushing an animal using the currycomb.
Since
we don’t know when the encampment might have sheltered Crusaders and
when it might have housed Muslim forces, how do we know it was Christian
soldiers changing their horses’ shoe nails?
Getzov,
who directed the site together with Milevski, actually studies
prehistory and was investigating the earlier layers of the site. But
being an archaeologist of prehistory he sifted all the dirt – not all
archaeologists do – and thusly found the nails, and identified them.
As
he explains to Haaretz, the Crusaders used European-style horseshoes
and nails that were not the norm in the Holy Land or among the Muslim
forces. “We can’t say who sat on the horse – as an Israeli soldier, I
used a Kalashnikov [made in Russia] – but I assume it was Crusaders,” he
says.
The
arrowheads are also interesting. Three feature the pyramidal shape that
could penetrate medieval armor. This was no innovation of the time:
rather similar though triple-vaned arrowheads go back to the Scythians 2,700 years ago.
The archaeologists also found one flat, kite-shaped arrowhead.
Lewis
points out that, first of all, these arrows would have been the results
of training during the waiting period or possibly from small-scale
clashes at the springs themselves. The arrowheads that were found had
broken off their shafts; ones that didn’t remained stuck in soldiers or
horses and are gone, he points out.
Also,
Lewis thinks the arrowheads may resolve a mystery: where exactly the
Battle of Cresson of May 1, 1187, took place. True, that clash is named
for the Spring of Cresson (Ein Gozeh) near Nazareth, which is assumed to
be where the Battle of Cresson between the Muslim and Christian forces
took place. But Lewis says not all researchers agree on this location.
Asked
if just four arrowheads a battlefield make, he explains: usually even
fewer are found, if any, unlike the great numbers found in the
destruction layers of occupied castles, for example. If any are found in
the open field (as in this case), one only finds the ones broken from
the shafts and not picked up at the end of the bloodshed.
He
stresses that the arrowheads may portend nothing beyond target practice
ahead of war but, at least, suggests their discovery reopens the debate
on the Battle of Cresson. “I think the Springs of Saforie is a good
candidate, though I’m not convinced myself,” he says,
Sleeping in formation
When
marching to battle some distance from their encampment, the Frankish
knights would go on a “fighting march”, i.e., in battle formation,
typically dividing into three groups. The king would be in the central
force, and if they were taking a religious relic (like what they thought was a shard from the True Cross) into battle, that would be in the central force too.
The
central force would be flanked by a front guard and a rear guard, each
force acting as necessary, maneuvering by itself and shouldering its own
functions and responsibilities.
The
location of the finds at the Springs of Saforie may tell an intriguing
story. “The Latin forces cannot be described as an army, at least not in
the modern sense,” Lewis says – they may all have been under the
command of the King of Jerusalem, but each fought under its own leader
and flag.
The
artifacts were found in clusters, which may attest that the soldiers
were camping out in their famous “fighting march” formation.
The
king himself probably pitched his tent – had his tent pitched – on Tel
Tzippori, a small mound overlooking the valley with its own water supply
in the form of a well. “Nothing but the best for the king,” Lewis
observes.
Indeed,
the closer the archaeologists got to the water sources, the finer the
goods became. They found the classiest artifacts, the most high quality,
in the vicinity of the springhouse (the main water source), which had
been built centuries earlier during the Roman period.
What
kind of aristocratic artifacts? Gilded buckles and hairpins,
manufactured in aristocratic European style. Asked if it was likely that
the Crusader warriors decked out their hairdos out in hairpins, Lewis
points out that not all men in the camp came from the same cultural
origin, just as each group was riding under a different banner.
The
Hospitallers and Knights Templar generally wore their hair trimmed and
wouldn’t have needed hairpins, but maybe there were other types in the
force. Alternatively, some of the pins could have been used as clothing
fasteners; or the lot may have belonged to camp followers. “We know from
a few years later from the siege of Acre, during the third crusade,
there were all kinds of activities happening around these siege camps,”
Lewis says.
So
after fighting among themselves all night, the Crusader commanders gave
the marching order, in formation, the following morn and thus the
soldiers set out, to where we are not sure.
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