There is consensus that the Franks couldn't have caused the loss on their own

submitted by Meme Curator

https://media.piefed.social/posts/yO/Lu/yOLumeTRgVA8T1Q.webp

There is consensus that the Franks couldn't have caused the loss on their own
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by Meme Curator OP depth: 1

Explanation: The Battle of Montgisard was a major loss for Saladin and the Muslim coalition’s forces against the Christian Crusaders. Saladin captured many of the Crusader troops as they were assembling, and left the Crusaders with an army so reduced that it refused to meet him in battle, instead hiding inside of a fortress. Saladin, in a rare moment of poor judgement, spread his troops out to forage on the way to take Jerusalem, believing that the Crusader King Baldwin IV, a leper and a teenager, suffering from malaria on top of that, would not dare fight Saladin’s larger and more powerful army.

Baldwin IV had stones, though. As soon as Saladin left the vicinity of the fortress he had put the Crusaders behind, he recalled the forces of the knightly crusading orders to rendezvous with his forces, and, with a still vastly outnumbered army, ambushed Saladin’s forces. Saladin’s forces had, themselves, become bogged down in bad terrain and strung out even further than their forage would normally take them when the Crusaders fell upon them. Baldwin IV led his army personally into battle, and overwhelmed Saladin’s forces with a surprise heavy cavalry charge Crusaders were (in)famous for, driving Saladin back into Egypt with a fraction of his army.

Both sides regarded this as divine intervention - the Christians for their obvious good fortune, and the Muslims because there was no fucking way that should have worked by any ordinary standard! God’s punishment is upon us!


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