By Steve Tibble

The words ‘game’, ‘gaming’ and ‘gambling’ are obviously all closely related, and this was even more apparent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than it is today. We might play a game, say, of Monopoly or Jenga, just to pass the time – but in the Latin East, playing a game was almost entirely synonymous with gambling.

Gambling was popular in Europe but there were major differences with gaming in the Holy Land. Crusader gambling is unusual in that there are a disproportionately large number of references to gaming in the context of sieges. This is perhaps understandable. Sieges were binary, highly polarised affairs – apart from the gut-wrenching terrors of a short and bloodthirsty assault, they could be long and interminably dull. Horror and tedium were the finely balanced extremes of their everyday experience.

The men naturally sought entertainment when they were away from the trenches and siege lines. From the perspective of many frustrated Frankish commanders, however, it was an extremely unhelpful distraction for their troops. And for the chroniclers, far from being just a harmless pastime, it was something to blame if everything went wrong.

Gaming was a social activity which both Christians and Muslims had in common, and this had negative implications for the way in which Westerners viewed the Latin East: these sorts of habits allowed local European settlers to be characterised as having ‘gone native’, and hence, in the simultaneously homophobic and xenophobic parlance of the time, having become ‘soft and effeminate’.

It did not help that crusaders and Frankish settlers were, once again, seen as doing the work of the Lord – inevitably, this created unrealistically high expectations. Whether participating in the armed pilgrimage of a formal crusade or as settlers doing the good work of defending the Holy Land, their behaviour was expected to be better than normal – and that expectation extended to gambling. Gambling was firmly characterised as a vice by the clergy, and thus undermined the sanctity of the role that crusaders, perhaps somewhat unfairly and certainly unrealistically, were required to play.

Disaster at Sidon

In this context, gambling was inevitably viewed as a weakness of character. Some – the more addictive personalities – had enduring problems with such habits. In the spring of 1260, Julian Grenier, lord of Sidon, got into serious trouble. Julian had inherited many of his family’s larger than life and eccentric characteristics – one of his ancestors, as we shall see, was a famous pirate and renegade. The difference with Julian was that he not only had the misfortune to have bad habits, but also to live in a time of impending and unavoidable disaster. Almost unstoppable waves of Mongol warriors had entered the Middle East, sweeping all aside as they progressed. The tiny armies of the crusader states wisely hunkered down and tried to avoid them wherever possible. But Julian chose not to take that option.

According to one Christian source, Julian, as volatile and intemperate as his buccaneer ancestor, had raided Mongol-held lands, and attacked Muslim civilians who were under their protection. In retaliation, a Mongol army set up camp around Sidon, the centre of his lordship, and started preparations for an assault – the fortified city had two strong castles within it, but only undermanned and vulnerable town walls to protect the civilian population. The invaders deliberately tried to intimidate and provoke a response. Julian duly obliged and organised a defiant defence.

The Enemy at the Gates

He made sure the Mongols did not have everything their own way. As they launched their assaults, the chronicler now called ‘the Templar of Tyre’ wrote that they were ‘resisted in [their] attack by the lord of Sidon, Sir Julian [Grenier], who was on his horse at the entrance to the gate, defending the entrance so vigorously with the few men that he had that two horses were killed under him’. Julian’s fierce resistance was brave and, up to a point, calculated – he was trying to defend his vassals and the civilians of the town, and help them to escape. He made sure that he ‘held the entrance so long that the common people had a great deal of time to retire together to a pair of castles, one inland and the other on the sea’.

When the Mongols eventually broke in, they took their revenge, inflicting huge damage on the walls and buildings. The carnage was so severe that within a few months Julian was forced to sell Sidon ‘to the Templars, because he did not have the resources to repair the walls which had been thrown down’.

Even with his exemplary track record for courage and noblesse oblige, Julian was still criticised for his gambling. ‘This Julian was a gallant knight, hardy and vigorous’, wrote one contemporary chronicler, but he was also ‘quite reckless and lacking in good judgement, with a big frame and limbs and large, well-built bones; he indulged the lusts of the flesh, and was an avid gambler, and beggared himself by playing’. People still thought the loss of his lordship was at least partly self-inflicted – no matter how well you behaved in other respects, your gambling habits would come back to haunt you.

The Pit of Despair

By an extraordinary chance, corroborating physical evidence of this bloodthirsty incident has recently come to light. Archaeologists working in Sidon (now in southern Lebanon) have discovered a mid-thirteenth century grave pit, hastily dug into the ditch on the landward side of the old city walls. This pit, not far from the castle of St Louis (the ‘inland’ castle into which Julian had withdrawn), was presumably near the last line of retreat – the path along which the townsfolk and some remnants of the Frankish urban militia fled from the Mongol horsemen as they broke through into the city.

A total of some 25 bodies were found in the grave – but the bones may also represent the remains of other bodies too, as many of the skeletons are incomplete. The vast majority of the corpses, probably all of them, were male. This hopefully indicates that the women and children had already been evacuated into the castle precincts, leaving the men behind to conduct the defence of the city walls as best they could and buy their families time to get away.

The evidence presented by the bodies suggests strongly that they were part of the grisly massacre which Julian and his retinue had fought to prevent. The majority of the men in the pit had perhaps died en route from the walls, as the last defenders tried in vain to fall back on foot, pursued by the fearsome Mongol cavalry.

The ‘Other’ Crusaders

Their DNA, where it is possible to carry out testing, gives a good indication of the type of ethnicity one would expect in a ‘crusader’ garrison of this type. Some of the men were clearly of European origin. Others, perhaps local Arab Christians or Armenians were native to the region. Still others were of mixed race, reflecting the diverse demographic make-up of the cosmopolitan ‘Latin’ population of the crusader states – even the royal families were mixed race settlers (the ‘pulani’ as the chroniclers referred to them). This ethnic melting pot was mirrored in death as much as in life, as the bodies were thrown into the makeshift pit together, their bones mingling together over time.

The manner of their death reveals much of the trauma they experienced in their last few minutes of life. Broadly, the men can be divided into two groups – those who died quickly in the fighting, probably cut off while fleeing towards Sidon’s castles, and those who died shortly afterwards in captivity. For each group, the grim story played out as one might have anticipated.

Those who died in the retreat from the walls seem to fit the pattern of the events described by the Templar of Tyre. They were men running in panic, painfully aware that their chances of survival were slipping away with every passing second. They found themselves the prey of the tough Mongolian steppe cavalry. Inevitably under these circumstances, they suffered a disproportionate amount of wounds on the back of their bodies.

As they were infantry running away from adrenaline-filled cavalrymen, they suffered all the kinds of predictable but traumatic wounds that went with their desperate situation – glancing blows to the head as horsemen overtook them, slashing sword wounds on the shoulders and upper arms, and stabs in the back as they tried, but failed, to evade their attackers. Tellingly, given that the mace was the preferred sidearm of many Mongol cavalrymen, some also suffered hideous concussive wounds to the head – appalling injuries which reflected the viciousness of the weapon and the transferred kinetic energy of a charging horse. The injuries were horrific.

And yet these victims were perhaps the lucky ones.

Torture and Torment

The other group of bodies seem to be those of Christian prisoners. These men suffered traumatic injuries to the back of the neck, reflecting, again in the traditional Mongol way, a predilection for beheading prisoners. Not all had died so quickly, however. Some of the bodies had the tell-tale signs of thorough torture on the interminable path to an inevitable death – one Frankish soldier suffered more than twelve wounds before he died. It appears that the Mongols, enraged by their inability to capture the two castles of Sidon, vented their fury by torturing and executing their prisoners – perhaps in full view of the garrison of the castle of St. Louis, in order to antagonise those who had escaped and thwarted them.

Just in case anyone thought that life in the crusader states was not tough enough already, and if the added difficulties of working for an inveterate gambler were not sufficiently demeaning, the Mongols were there to make things even worse.

A ‘Hasty Impulse’

A gambling problem was viewed, not entirely illogically, as a broader symptom of a flawed and weak character as well as a cause of difficulties in its own right. Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch, for instance, had a reputation not only as a degenerate gambler, but also as having ‘a habit of acting on a hasty impulse’, and being prone to outbursts of anger. Gambling in his case was seen as an obvious indicator of his underlying personality deficiencies – just one more manifestation of the rash disposition which made him a flawed leader for his people. Unhappily for his subjects, he was said to be ‘seldom lucky’, either in his gambling or, more importantly, in his handling of affairs of state – and it is clear how closely the two things were linked in the public mind.

Like a drug, gambling caused men to be remiss with their duties. Taking the example of Raymond of Antioch once more, we find that at the siege of Shaizar in 1138 he allowed his addictive habit to overshadow his military priorities. ‘While others were engaged in strenuous conflict,’ wrote the Frankish chronicler William of Tyre, Raymond and Count Jocelyn II of Edessa, ‘let themselves be drawn away by the frivolous pursuits common to [young] men of their age. They were continually playing at games of chance to the great detriment of their own interests.’

Even more dangerously, this lethargy was infectious – the torpor and lack of leadership was corrosive and ‘influenced others to take a less active part in the siege.’ This poor behaviour may well have been a political statement of sorts. The Frankish leadership was sulking at the prospect of having to fulfil their treaty obligations by helping the Byzantines. But petulance and a lack of self-control with gambling or other vices naturally played out very well together.

This disgraceful dereliction of duty was echoed in the visual portrayals of the siege. While the Byzantine commander is shown in manuscript illustrations as leading from the front and energetically prosecuting the attacks, the crusaders’ leaders are portrayed idly gambling together – though it is interesting to note that, perhaps for reasons of social status, they are shown to be gambling over a game of chess, rather than with the less intellectually demanding dice that were their real preference.

In practice, seeking an outright ban on gambling or gaming was rare – stopping it altogether was usually felt to be too draconian and, more to the point, impossible to enforce. Instead, the authorities tried to compromise. There were times and places when gambling would be tolerated – in bars, for instance, and when not on campaign. But there were other times, such as in the middle of a siege, when it was considered extremely unhelpful – weakness, a flawed character and the loss of support from an all-seeing God were a toxic combination.

Want to learn more about crime during the Crusades? Check out Steve Tibble’s new book Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land.

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Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.

You can check out Steve’s other books: Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain, The Crusader Armies and The Crusader Strategy

Top Image: Schaffhausen, Stadtbibliothek, Gen. 8, f. 239r – Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/sbs/0008)