desert battles

[gunslinger]

As someone who has fought in the desert while wearing armor, I can tell you that it's no picnic, and I had the advantage of all the fresh water with which I could glut myself, decent food, and even some occasional air conditioning for relief. Even though my unit was from Illinois, where we typically see temps of 100 degrees F with high humidity in the Summer, we all spent the first two weeks in the desert collapsed in a puddle in our tent while we tried to acclimate, and it was still only springtime!

Heh. I'm suddenly having flashbacks to when I first started fighting Muslim armies in MTW: "Gah! Just hold still, d*** you!"

Funny, that's still the situation in real life. We are very much like the heavy European Armies (Slow, Heavy, and Unstoppable) while they just "won't stand still and take a charge," prefering instead to use hit and run tactics and nibble at the flanks. Who doesn't believe that history repeats itself, or that the way our ancestors lived and fought doesn't manifest itself in our mindset today?

[Watchman]

Something most folks seem to kind of forget is that around the early Crusading period quite a few of the better-equipped Middle Eastern warriors actually wore more armour than the Catholic newcomers (the prevalence of powerful composite bows and increasing numbers of annoyingly limb-severing sabres in the area may have had something to do with that). And it didn't get all that lighter later either. Cavalrymen might wear several mail hauberks and a lamellar corselet atop that for good measure...

One also needs to keep in mind the East Romans/Byzantines and first assorted locals (like the Palmyrans) and Persians (ie. Parthians and Sassanids) and later Muslim Arabs and Turks once they got access to enough manufacturing base kept gleefully throwing massively armoured cavalry at each other in the region for a long time, and kept doing so after the Crusaders had been served the eviction note. Mind you, the Mongols joined the fun for a while too. Armoured horses weren't exactly rare either, and I understand one of the biggest problems with barding even in milder climes tended to be heat exhaustion; yet the beasts down there appear to have markedly failed to keel over en masse due to heat strokes.

That doesn't of course mean less armour wouldn't be rather more comfortable, but one suspects popular commonplace rather overrates the heat issue (besides being rather ignorant of the actual military powers involved). I'm under the impression even very heavy troops were normally right fine so long as they covered most of the metal from direct sun (the local "Franks" adopted local styles of dress rather quickly no doubt partly for this end) and were supplied with enough water.

[Randarkmaan]

I don't think the heat penalties will be the same as what they were in MTW.
Anyway Islamic warriors were not as lightly armed our armoured as many often assume... Arab cavalrymen (not bedouin) for instance wore long mail hauberks, iron helmets (often with coifs or aventails), wielded lances and swords (straight up to the end of the 12th century, then the Arabs also started using sabres on a large scale) and carried shields (many of which were of kite construction). If you compare this to the equipment of a European cavalrymen up until the 13th century you will realize how strikingly similarily they are equipped. Farther east (in Persia and Trasnoxania) equipment was usually heavier than this and often included a horse with iron barding (lamellar or mail)

EDIT: Oh, seems like the above poster said exactly what I did...

I think the biggest things that held the europeans back was poor knowledge of the area, atrociously bad logistics, being massively outnumbered, and the ridiculous infighting and bickering that their multinational groups engaged in at any opportunity.

Their heavily armored knights were an asset, and would routinely smash vastly larger arab formations if the latter would stand still like obliging fellows and let themselves get charged.

The Crusaders weren't always massively outnumbered, though towards the end they were because the enthusiasm for Crusades had dropped in Europe and Europeans were far too busy killing each other (as most people in the world have been preoccupied with since the beginning of time). The sad thing (for the Crusader states) was that often when troops from Europe came they just raided some territory sieged a castle and went home whilst the Crusader States had to fight a war. Another thing that many do not know is that at Hattin Saladin used mostly only his 12,000 professional cavalrymen (who were mostly light cavalry, though about 4-5000 were heavy cavalry, the Crusaders numbered about 22 000 men of which about 5000 were heavy cavalry) the rest of his force (his infantry), which was mostly made up of volunteers were 'preserved' for siege warfare, though some were used at the end of the battle and some lit bonfires amongst the Crusaders while they were sleeping.

Anyway a charge by heavy cavalry, against a foe that is standing still and not braced properly for the attack (lacking spears, pikes, ditches... etc) will most of the time ride the opposition down, you must not forget that this happened with heavy cavalry charges against European armies as well. Also the Muslims used their heavy cavalry in a bit different way from the Europeans, their heavy cavalry usually covered the withdrawal of light harrasing cavalry (Ayyubids and other Turkish influenced armies), executed repeated charge and withdrawal attacks with a portion of their horsemen (nearly all, but not so much from the Turks), or used their heavy horsemen to cover an infantry advance (Fatimids and earlier Muslim armies), most of these tactics were similar to the ones used by the Byzantines. In pitched battles European heavy cavalry mostly relied on an all out charge with nearly everything they had, they lacked proper battlefield communications to use other tactics, this type of attack was terminal to the enemy if it succeded but it was very risky and if stopped often spelled certain disaster for the whole army. Also by the 13th century Mamluks were able to effectively halt a charge by Crusader heavy cavalry using horse-archery alone (not skirmishing mind you, horse-archers drawn up in ranks firing while standing still).