Quote Originally posted by Hulegu:
Anyway, what I really wanted to say was this: surely you felt, after doing all that work to get the province, that you were not going to hand over the province for any reason? It is an option to fight them instead. But perhaps you were in no position to get involved in a major war...[/QUOTE]

Emotionally I definitely felt that way. But as some of our politicians need to learn the hard way emotion is a bad premise for starting a war.

The fact of the matter was that Prince Edwards army (still about 1000 strong) was isolated. It was surrounded on all sides by hostile muslim forces with no way of replenishing its losses.

On the one hand it had fulfilled its mission and was therefore expendable on the other hand there were a lot of good troops that I wanted to keep if I could.

I had already taken the precaution of capturing Tripoli so that it had somewhere to retreat to if it lost a battle. So I was fortunate that I didn't have to fight the Italian's to survive.

The Italian Crusade had over 2,000 men in it and Italy was an ally. I might have been able to beat them and retain control of Antioch but in doing so would have lost a lot of men and would probably have lost to the next Jihad anyway.

Furthermore, at the time Antioch was only defended by a stockade whilst Tripoli had a keep and a few basic troop producing buildings in it.

So! I swallowed my pride and did the sensible thing in allowing the Italian Crusade to move in to Antioch. This enabled my smaller army to concentrate on defending Tripoli let the Italians take the heat from the Turks for a while and enabled me to complete a relatively easy second crusade to Tripoli which was little more than a reinforcement mission.

I have since repeated the process of expanding into Syria just in case the Italians send a crusade to Tripoli. However, whether I step aside again will depend upon the geo-political situation at the time. Italy are becoming a dominant force in the Balkans and recently killed the pope plus their GA points are on a par with my own.

I am already organising a campaign of subversion and insurrection amongst their Balkan provinces but if they try to send a crusade to Tripoli I may decide to fight as I now have troop producing capability in that region.

I am actually very pleased with the way it turned out though I still think I should have had the points for the Antioch and Tripoli crusades after all they were successful.

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Didz
Fortis balore et armis