PieFedSo fucking true, Emir spitting straight fire šš
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PugJesus
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Explanation: For those of you who are unaware, this is a riff on the āAll modern girls know how to do is eat hot chip, be bisexual, and lieā meme.
Muslims are not supposed to eat pork - one of many marked differences between Muslims and the Catholics they had to contend with during the Crusades.
While the Muslim coalition was not exactly horse-shy themselves, aristocratic Western Europeans during the period of the Crusades were famous (or infamous, depending on which end of the charge you were on) for making unstoppable cavalry charges - a one-trick pony, or the man who has practiced 1 kick 10,000 times, depending on your point of view. Byzantine cavalry attempted their charges at a steady pace to maintain cohesion. Muslim polities generally made use of native aristocratic warrior traditions, which placed high value on a well-rounded military education, including horse archery and maneuvering, or nomadic recruits, who are generally disinclined towards throwing their lives away in an impetuous headlong assault - nomads survive by speed!
The Byzantine writer Anna Komnene, an Orthodox Christian, said that a ābarbarianā Western European cavalry charge was relentless enough to bore through a stone wall - obvious hyperbole, but showing that even those less-than-amiable towards Western Europeans admitted that there was something unique in their technique!
Didnāt the muslims win basically every crusade? So what was the counter to the constant cavalry charges?
As mentioned, itās a bit of a one-trick pony - thereās a million ways for a charge of heavy shock cavalry to go wrong, and only one real way for it to go right (head-on contact with the main body of the enemy force). Against infantry, who canāt really maneuver faster than a horse, this is basically guaranteed on open ground - against even the heaviest and slowest cavalry, this is a bit more risky. You can (and the Muslim polities did) use light cavalry to skirmish just out of their charging range until theyāre exhausted, or use your own heavy cavalry to encircle them once they commit to the charge, or have them charge entrenched heavy infantry as ābaitā so that you can immediately swarm them with fresh reserves once their momentum is wasted, or use rough terrain against them, or etc etc etc.
The Crusaders actually won the First Crusade, and the Second Crusade failed because of infighting. From the Third Crusade onwards, though, the previous infantry-dominated armies of Egypt were replaced by Saladin with a much more cavalry-heavy force, which played against the Crusadersā strength (running down people who arenāt faster than them), and later Muslim polities of the region would maintain this military shift (in part due to the influence of an increasing number of Turkish nomads).
From the Third Crusade onwards, both the greater understanding of the āFranks like to chargeā tactic and the shift in Muslim military composition meant that future Crusader victories were dependent either on failures of Muslim commanders to remember āLetting Franks charge you is badā, or Crusader use of combined-arms tactics, as the shift to cavalry-heavy armies had led Muslim polities to severely weaken their infantry arm.
great explaination, thank you