[Gregory J. Liebau]

Hello folks,

I have a paper that I wrote in college that I'm planning to redevelop into a more academic piece for possible publishing. It's about the relationship between Crusading knights' armament and tactics, and how the two aspects were critical to the success of the mounted charge.

I would like commentary and suggestions from anyone willing to give the paper a read. I want to stress the relation between the armor, weaponry and tactics more thoroughly. I also want to expand the source base to include more European descriptions of battles and combat. A few come to mind but I have not thoroughly combed them regarding the subject. Because the paper was written for a course which required some historiography, there is a bit of that in the beginning of the paper and in the conclusion. Those sections will be cut out.

I'm unable to post an .rtf file as an attachment, so I can email the document to anyone who'd like to read the paper for whatever reason. Just send me a PM. Thanks for your time!

-Gregory L.

[Daniel Wallace]

it's got my interest a little, but what time period of the crusades is your paper based on? honestly you can write an entire book off of your theme there.

[Gregory J. Liebau]

It's based strictly between the First and Third Crusades and focuses almost entirely on Eastern primary sources such as Usama Ibn Munqidh, Ibn Shaddad and Anna Komnene. Based on a typical magazine or journal page size, the body of the text would be about 10 pages long, and possibly a couple more total with the footnotes, which need to be expanded in detail. All of the original cited texts will be reverted to their original language form and re-translated carefully by professionals (of who I know enough to help out where I cannot do the job.) After all is said and done I'd like a tidy 20 pages or so out of it. Nothing crazy - it's my first attempt at publishing, and will likely be sent first to the San Francisco State University History Department for review to be added to next year's Ex Post Facto, the department's annual journal. I graduated from the department in May and will also be working closely with two professors there editing it. They are not warfare experts, though, so I wanted to throw it out here!

As it stands, after re-reading it a couple of more times, I now plan on reorganizing it entirely, but much of the information utilized will remain the same. I want to throw in European sources from the century in question but stick to Crusading examples to exemplify the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of European technology and tactics.

In the end, the thesis of the paper is simply to correlate various aspects of armament and tactics that made the 'Franks' so fierce in combat on technical levels. I believe that the authoritative work that deals with this written to date is Crusading Warfare 1097-1193 written by Smail in the 50s. His work, however, focuses on many aspects and muddies the waters a lot, and almost completely lacks concern for technological advantages afforded to the Europeans. I would like to bridge this gap and also present the information in a more concise form, as I was inspired to write the paper by such communities as this, where I often hear tales of anguish when individuals are trying to research aspects of such encompassing topics.

Really, it's not worth explaining a whole lot more about it... It's something you'd just have to read if you're interested and see where I'm going with it. Cheers!

-Gregory