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moment came for the cavalry to charge.

Because of the Turks’ tactics of harassing any force on the move, without committing themselves to a fuli scalę battle, special attention was also paid to the formation of units on the march, with van, rear and flank guards playing an important role. Archers and crossbowmen were usually pre-dominant in thesc divisions.

Too little credit is given to this aspect of organization and discipline in the Outremer armies; thcir history is studded with examples of their maintenance of rigid formation whilst march-ing through the enemy. On these occasions the foot soldiers marched on the outside of the cavalry so as to shield the knights’ precious horses from the arrows of the Turkish horsemen.

Generally speaking the men were placed under the command of their own lords within these divisions, and the tasks of vanguard, rearguard and

A great hełm of the mid-i3th century. Notę reinforcing strips at eye slits and down the front to form a cross, and angled front to deflect blows. Such helmets weighed between 15 and 20 lbs.

reserve were allotted to those contingents whose make-up was most suited to the role. The spearmen and archers were organized in smali companies or bands; the knights were divided into groups of between 20 and 25 men on average, again mostly following the banner of their overlord. The reserve was usually commanded by the commander-in-chief and was used to reinforce any threatened point or to prevent attack from the rear by the highly mobile Turks.

A particularly effective formation used by the crusaders on the march in 1099 and again in 1119 was a division ofnine ‘sąuadrons’ of knights in three ranks of three ‘sąuadrons’, which formed a cavalry sąuare capable of meeting an attack from any direction. This formation was only suitable for open country, however, and in the broken terrain of Syria the army morę usually marched in a long column.

The chief military officer of the kingdom was the Constable, who was responsible for military supplies and justice, and the hiring and control of merce-naries. If the king was absent from an expedition, the Constable became commander-in-chief; his lieutenant was the Marshal. Both the Hospitallers and Templars provided military advisers who were highly valued for their experience of war in the Holy Land, but the two orders were often at loggerheads in the pąth century and this madę for disunity and several drastic decisions which cost the kingdom many worthy knights it could ill afford to lose.

However, in generał the commanders of the armies of Outremer were hard-headed, practical fighting men, who proved able to adapt their methods of warfare to meet new weapons and tactics. As any defeat could spell utter disaster, many campaigns were entirely campaigns of manoeuvre; the annual Seljuk invasions between 1110 and 1115, for example, were all cancelled out by manoeuvre alone. In 1115 the knights and feudal levies were kept in the field all summer before the Turks were decisively defeated at the battle of Tell Danith. But the importance of that battle fades into insignificance beside the fact that, in an age when the armies of Europę could rarely be hcld in the field for morę than six to eight weeks, the army of Outremer remained in the field for five months.

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