Dr Steve Tibble: ‘Crusader Criminals – Pirates, Gangsters and Bandits in the Medieval Holy Land'

‘Crusader Criminals – Pirates, Gangsters and Bandits in the Medieval Holy Land.

Strange as it may seem, the real problem of the crusades was not religion.

It was young men.

Dislocated. Disinhibited. And in disturbingly large numbers. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.

‘Crusader Criminals’ takes an innovative look at what was so different about the crusades and the unforeseen consequences that they brought with them. It identifies the primal forces which pushed vast numbers of young, disoriented men into the region, and in turn created a massive spike in violence and law-breaking. It examines how macro trends such as climate change, migration and demographic distortion played out over a two hundred year period – and how, by pulling successive waves of rootless men into the Holy Land, this arguably caused as much social chaos and disruption as the wars of the crusades themselves.

‘Crusader Criminals’ charts the downward spiral of demographic shock and desensitisation that grew out of the horrors of incessant warfare – and in doing so it uncovers some of the most surprising stories of the time. It introduces remarkable and barely known characters into an era already full of larger-than-life personalities.

Presented by one of the foremost historians working in the field of crusading studies, this is a talk about crime and the violation of social norms in the most unlikely of places - the medieval Holy Land. Bringing largely unused material together for the first time, it provides extraordinary evidence of a pervasive crusading underworld - the gangsters, bandits, muggers and pirates who lurked under the bigger events that dominated the chronicles.

Dr Steve Tibble is a Ledbury-based historian, a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, and a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades' and 'The Cambridge History of the Crusades' (2024).

His recent publications have been critically acclaimed and include 'The Crusader Armies' (Yale, 2018), 'The Crusader Strategy' (Yale, 2020, short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize) and 'Templars – The Knights Who Made Britain' (Yale, 2023). Steve's latest book, 'Crusader Criminals – The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land', came out in the summer of 2024, and takes a unique look at the crimewave which engulfed the Middle East in the wake of the crusades.