Crusader Criminals: Plunder, pillage and the usual suspects

Plunder and looting is an obvious issue with all armies - and particularly with ill-disciplined medieval expeditions. But what were the underlying factors? And why were some wars so much worse than others?

The talk provides an innovative case study about what was so different about criminality in the crusades. It examines the primal forces, such as climate change and mass migration, which pushed vast numbers of young, disoriented men into the region. And it tells the extraordinary stories which emerged from the ensuing spike in violence – an astounding and brutal wave of looting which also encompassed piracy, banditry and muggings.

Strange as it may seem, the real problem of the crusades, and all the horrors of plunder and looting which accompanied it, was not religion. It was young men. They were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.

The reason they caused such problems was not that they were over-entitled, over-sexed, or over-opinionated about religion – though they were often all of those things. The ultimate cause, and the ultimate reason why these men generated much of the chaos that engulfed the medieval Middle East, was far more basic – it was demographic and anthropological rather than theological.

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