21
I will not spare these proud Egyptians,
Nor change my martial observations
For all the wealth of Gihon’s golden waves,
Or for the love of Venus, would she leave
The angry god of arms and lie with me.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, Act V, Scene I.
Egypt’s tardy response to the Crusade’s march on Palestine was too late to save Jerusalem. It was also discovered easily, when the Crusaders captured scouts on the coast north of Ascalon where the army was gathering. Godfrey took the initiative and marched on the Fatimid port. The Egyptian army should have been more than adequate to defeat the Crusaders. It met them in open country and outnumbered them two to one. It was poor generalship, and some lack of fortune, that ultimately brought failure.
The Egyptian army was ethnically mixed. Fulcher of Chartres described Ethiopians in the Jerusalem garrison, and the Fatimid infantry were commonly Sudanese. A wing of Arab cavalry was usually deployed alongside heavier Turkish cavalry. Each unit had clearly defined tactical roles. The Fatimid army had been reduced from the 100,000 men of the 1060s, due to Egypt’s shrinking fortunes, but the army of the early twelfth century was in fact better for this downsizing. It was more professional and less tribally split, and was well provisioned, at least initially. A treatise by al-Tarsusi, though it was written for Saladin, shows how the Fatimid army was divided down by into distinct roles:
Place the infantry ahead of the cavalry to make a firm fortress. In front of every foot soldier place a kite-shaped shield or a screen as a protection against those who attack with sword, spear, or arrow. Behind each pair of men place an archer with a crossbow or with heavy bows and arrows. Their role is to drive back the attackers. The cavalry and heavy defensive cavalry to the rear are separated from danger by the archers. Meanwhile the offensive cavalry wait to deliver a charge. Troops are grouped together into units with a prearranged separation between them. When the cavalry return from their charge, and flow back towards their point of departure, the infantry return to their original places, reassembling like the elements of a building. On the field of battle it is necessary to arrange the ranks gathered into squadrons of soldiers and with the cavalry grouped flag by flag and battalion by battalion. This should be done when it is the enemy’s habit to charge in a mass and to rely for impact on separate detachments of their force, as is the case with the evil Frank Crusaders.
This all sounds highly effective in theory but battle is always a chancy business and there are no guarantees that the enemy will play his part in one’s strategy. It is difficult to reconstruct the Battle of Ascalon from the sources, but the evidence available indicates that the Fatimid force was stationary and presented the perfect target – a fixed mass of men – for the Crusader charge, which rapidly turned their ‘fortress’ of troops into a chaotic shambles of panicking men. One charge was enough, and it seems that the Fatimids were caught out by the speed of the Crusaders’ move to the charge. After so long fighting together, the Crusader knights would have been able to organise very swiftly behind an equally quickly formed wall of infantry. The Fatimid deployment would have taken far longer to organise. The wazir, Al-Afdal, had also failed to set scouts and the Crusaders’ pre-dawn attack caught him unawares.
The Fatimid army had been badly mauled. As a result of these losses and the fact that so many of the Fatimid troops were slaughtered in their pell-mell retreat to Ascalon, it was two years before the wazir would return with his army to attempt once more to push the Crusaders from Palestine.