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Tarawa and the Seventh Crusade

Combat Multipliers, Lethality, and the True Cross

 

John D. Hosler, PhD

 

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They hoped that morning for a rising neap tide high enough to provide unobstructed passage of boats as well as amphibious tractors. It was not to be … while the first three waves of assault troops in tracked LVTs [Landing Vehicle Tracked] crossed the reef without incident, the Marines never got the necessary four feet of water over the reef to permit passage of their landing craft, or “Higgins Boats,” bearing the balance of the assault forces, supporting arms, and reinforcements. What they got instead was … “The Tide That Failed” … thousands of Marines had to wade the six- to eight-hundred yards to shore, and hundreds fell to Japanese gunners … No American who ever saw it can deny the feelings of rage and helplessness he experienced.

—Joseph Alexander, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa

 

This is the narrative from the storming of Red 1, Red 2, and Red 3 beaches on Betio Island in the Tarawa Atoll on 20 November 1943 during World War II. The battle, although ultimately a victory for the United States, resulted in 3,407 casualties, including nearly a thousand marines killed in action.

Many factors have been credited with enabling the marines’ eventual, grinding success at Tarawa. Operating under a lack of coordinated fire control, enough went right that the marines managed to overcome the island defenses. They overcame a breakdown in command and control with impromptu solutions, and the reserve 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, was committed to stiffen the beachhead. Meanwhile, fortuitous gunfire disabled Japanese communication lines and towers and killed the commander of the defense, Adm. Meichi Shibasaki.¹ Most historians would agree that there is rarely any one decisive factor in battle. Even so, they typically find ways to pinpoint discrete, critical moments in an action or, perhaps more commonly, people whose actions seemed especially determinative. For Tarawa, partial credit has fallen on Marines Corps leadership, particularly then–Col. David M. Shoup, who “contributed more to the battle simply by being there, ashore, available, in command.”² His Medal of Honor citation credits him with being “largely responsible for the final decisive defeat of the enemy.”³

On Combat Multipliers

Shoup’s leadership can be read in more technical terms as a “combat multiplier,” defined in Marine Corps doctrine as something that qualitatively improves the efficacy of soldiers in the field when force ratios remain constant; in other words, not a quantitative addition of combat power but rather a qualitative enhancement of the power one already possesses.⁴ Examples beyond leadership typically include training, secure supply lines, and deception—all factors that can enable better tactical and operational performance. However, a rather peculiar sort of combat multiplier has largely evaded detection, perhaps because it seemingly belongs to an earlier age: the perceived power of religious artifacts. This article seeks to illustrate their historical place by examining a conflict with similarities to the Tarawa landings but occurring seven hundred years beforehand, the so-called Seventh Crusade of King Louis IX of France (1248–1254). On the issue of multipliers specifically and littoral warfare in general, the history of this war has much to offer modern military professionals.

Tarawa, in fact, reads like a modern version of the Seventh Crusade, an expedition mounted by the French crown against the Ayyubid sultanate in Cairo. The crusader fleet gathered in Cyprus and sailed toward the Nile River delta to the south. Upon reaching the Egyptian shore, the crusaders discovered it occupied by Ayyubid defenders and were thereby forced to storm the beach. According to the account of Vincent of Beauvais, a Dominican friar with close connections to the French court and the documents produced therein, the crusaders encountered a situation on the Egyptian coast that the Marines may find eerily familiar:

Since the vessels that carried them were unable to reach dry land owing to the shallowness of the water, the Christian forces abandoned their boats in God’s name and leapt into the sea, making it to dry land on foot with their weapons. The Saracens who had occupied the shore, in their efforts to defend the land, kept up a strong hail of arrows and other weapons against our men as they left the boats and approached, and struck at them with their swords.⁵

Unlike the Marines, however, Louis IX’s soldiers lacked certain prerequisites that might have helped them conduct a proper amphibious assault. As Milan Vego has explained, these include the right weapons, a strong command organization, and cooperation between forces—all things present in the crusader army—but also the more modern requirements of proper platforms, sensors, air superiority, theory, and doctrine.⁶ However, the crusaders did have one advantage that medieval witnesses credited with the successful capture of the Egyptian shore. In Vincent of Beauvais’s words, “The King was in a vessel together with the legate, who carried the holy triumphal Cross of the Lord, bare and on display.”⁷ It was this relic, a fragment of the purported True Cross upon which Jesus Christ died in the first century AD, that medieval authors credited with the victory. Whereas Shoup’s identification as a combat multiplier stands as just one (albeit important and distinguished) interpretation of decisive factors at Tarawa, every Christian primary source for the crusade labels the Cross as the determinative factor.

On Relics

A “holy relic” turning the course of a military operation? Such a notion might not rest well with skeptical modern audiences. Yet in medieval perceptions, God could play a diverse array of roles in war, and narrators of battles and campaigns routinely attributed events to the miraculous—not only in the medieval West but also in most cultures throughout the premodern world.⁸ Relics were more than just inspirational or devotional artifacts, and contemporaries often celebrated them as having particular functions and special capabilities in war. True Cross fragments, in particular, were credited with enhancing command and control, altering tactical zones, shifting wind and storms, and even cursing adversaries. Both Cross fragments and other sorts of Christian relics (such as the bones of saints or the clothing of martyrs) were placed in weapons or unit standards, carried by retinues and housed within commanders’ headquarters, and some even played roles in diplomacy and treaty making; the Knights Templar had a regulation for transporting and guarding its piece of the True Cross while on campaign.⁹ Among those leaders carrying relics into battle before the eleventh century were at least three Byzantine emperors: Leo III (d. 741), Michael II “the Stammerer” (d. 829), and Basil II “the Bolgar Slayer” (d. 1025). William the Conqueror wore relics around his neck during his invasion of England in 1066, and English bishops carried them to the field at the Battle of the Standard in 1138.¹⁰ They appear throughout the period of the Crusades—on too numerous occasions to recount here—and then much later; Prince Henry the Navigator (d. 1460), the emperors Ferdinand I (d. 1416) and Maximilian II (d. 1576), and even Ivan the Terrible (d. 1584) all carried Christian relics into battle.

The place of True Cross is particularly well known to Crusades historians. Purported fragments of the Cross accompanied Pope Urban II on his recruiting tour for the First Crusade in 1095, and thereafter, pieces accompanied the forces of the Second Crusade (1147-1149) and nearly all the major campaigns conducted by the Kingdom of Jerusalem before 1187. In the latter year, the Jerusalem army famously lost a major fragment of the cross at the Battle of Hattin, which fell into the hands of the first Ayyubid sultan, Saladin. Following that disaster, the recovery of the True Cross became a priority for Western armies. Roman pontiffs specified it as a prime objective in the crusading bulls (official documents) for the Third (1189–1192) and Fourth (1202–1204) Crusades; thereafter, other fragments journeyed alongside the Fifth (1218–1221) and Seventh Crusades.

These pieces of wood occupied a highly visual presence in Latin armies. Although sometimes credited for influencing a battle directly (such as shifting the winds at Ascalon in 1146 to blow a grassfire at Sultan Nur al-Din’s army), it has been more commonly interpreted as having enhanced Christian martial spirit.¹¹ In some texts, the Cross’s mere presence, or lack thereof, seems to have raised or lowered morale, respectively, and then judged as the difference between victory and defeat. Esprit de corps is, of course, a vital aspect of soldiery performance. As defined in Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession, esprit de corps “denotes the collective camaraderie and cohesion within a unit … affecting mutual trust, cohesive teamwork, and the commitment to persevere through adversity, challenges, and setbacks.”¹² Indeed, relics often played such morale-boosting roles in medieval warfare.¹³ However, the employment of the True Cross in battle actually relates less to morale than meets the eye. Medieval authors were very explicit in their descriptions of the exact roles the relic played on campaigns and in battle. Indeed, they judged combat as its true purpose, interpreting it as it as a physical “means” of war that gave Christian armies an advantage over their foes by multiplying and enabling their martial efforts.

The modern concept of a combat multiplier therefore provides a better lens through which to view them. To return to our medieval-modern comparison, whatever the period, credit for success in battle falls upon people, events, or things that are judged—on the basis of testimony and observation—to have had decisive impacts. Following the Battle of Tarawa, testimony by David Shoup’s marines, other eyewitnesses, scrutiny of the evidence, and adherence to newly published regulations in 1942 resulted in the determination of his qualitative contribution to the battle.¹⁴ Likewise, thirteenth-century testimony for the Seventh Crusade—free of modern regulation and process but guided by numerous other traditions—similarly awarded credit to an object, not a person. In their particular context, those authors saw it amplifying the efforts of crusaders struggling ashore, making them better, stronger, more accurate, more deadly; in a word, more lethal.

The Landing in Egypt

Jean de Joinville, a close confidant of Louis IX and a participant in the Seventh Crusade, describes the opening maneuvers. On 20 May 1249 (a Monday), the French fleet of 1,800 vessels weighed anchor and set off for Egypt.¹⁵ It included a core of large “round” ships, a class of sailing ships common in that age, which carried both soldiers and horses; twenty of these ships were leased from Marseille. Accompanying them were twelve Genoese-contracted, specialized taride ships, which resemble a medieval version of the Marines’ Higgins boats at Tarawa; they were thirty-five-meters long with a capacity for twenty horses and a port designed to open onto a beach. A large number of other galleys, long boats, skiffs, and additional craft rounded out the fleet.¹⁶ Louis’s initial landing plan seems unclear. As John Pryor has explained, only the few taride could disgorge cargo on shore; the round ships, having no specialized gangplanks, required a wharf for unloading the mounts.¹⁷ The horses from the round ships, therefore, required transfer to smaller craft for ferrying. In an uncontested environment, this would have been a fairly straightforward process.

However, after a three-day journey, the French arrived off the Egyptian coast on 23 May (a Thursday) and spotted an unforeseen problem: Ayyubid cavalry and infantry defended the beachhead, accompanied by signal troops carrying horns and drums.¹⁸ The contemporary Muslim historian Ibn Wasil relates that advance preparations had, in fact, been made to prevent the crusader landing. The Ayyubid sultan, al-Malik al-Salih, assembled men and provisions at Damietta and tasked one of his emirs, Fakhr al-Din, to take command at the beach “so that they might confront the enemy when they arrived.”¹⁹ In other words, Louis IX would not be able to disembark his men and horses in peace and would either have to first fight his way to shore or abandon the landing site in preference for another. In council, Louis reasoned that a delay would “give heart to his enemies” and so chose to proceed with the operation.²⁰ He set the landing for Friday, 24 May (Ibn Wasil claims it was actually Saturday), no doubt spending the time in between gathering intelligence on the number and state of defenders.²¹ Between two thousand and six thousand Ayyubid cavalry awaited the crusaders on shore.²²

The operation proceeded in a semiorganized fashion. Troops dropped from the larger ships into smaller landing craft, and Joinville relates a story of too many men nearly sinking his own transport.²³ Louis had anticipated that his small craft would land on the beach and disgorge their knights and soldiers, who would then advance into combat. However, once the crusaders got within range, the defenders commenced firing with their crossbows. Some crusaders replied with their own crossbows, shooting from boats rocking in the surf.²⁴ The landing was therefore contested from the very start.

As the vessels progressed toward shore, the relic of the True Cross accompanied them. Cecilia Gaposchkin has identified the specific relic in question, the so-called “triumphal Cross” acquired by Louis IX on 30 September 1242, as small and housed in a reliquary that could be hung around the neck on a chain. This fragment was believed to have been carried into battle previously by Roman emperors.²⁵ On the Seventh Crusade, the legate Odo of Châteauroux carried it while standing either beside the king in his ship or in a vessel rowing close by.²⁶ Along with the Oriflamme (a sacred battle standard), it provided inspiration to the soldiers. But while the latter (otherwise known as the standard of Saint Denis) led them into the fight as a rallying symbol, the True Cross remained somewhat behind the force in the king’s landing vessel. As the ships moved forward, the Cross followed astride—Odo held the reliquary up high, urging the men to their cause.

Some galleys evidently made it to shore safely, landing nearly clear of the water and disembarking their crews and cargo. Joinville’s descriptions of three boats tell a miniature story of how events unfolded. His boat ran aground first, and he and his comrades hastily assembled a shield wall, planting their shields in the sand with spear tips protruding between them—this effectively deterred a small cavalry charge.²⁷ Next arrived a boat commanded by his cousin, the count of Jaffa, who similarly hit the beach and began to pitch his tents. A few hundred yards to Joinville’s right another ship, commanded by John of Beaumont, the marshal of France, and carrying the Oriflamme, made land.²⁸ Together, the crusaders began to establish a beachhead that might support follow-on forces.

Joinville’s three ships were fortunate. Much like at Tarawa, where only a few tracked LVTs (Landing Vehicle, Tracked) managed to get past an outlying reef, most of the other crusader boats ran aground in shallow water. Just like the marines, the crusaders were forced to abandon their landing craft and leap into the water—which in some places reached up to their necks—and struggle forward partially submerged in full array. So wrote one of the noble participants, Robert, Louis IX’s brother and count of Artois: they “penetrated with their arms to the dry land on foot.”²⁹ Not everyone struggled toward land immediately. Some knights attempted to first tumble their horses out of the skiffs. Other crusaders remained in the boats and provided suppressive fire, shooting bolts at the beach defenders while their comrades slowly moved forward.³⁰ In the meantime, some of the Ayyubid cavalry rode into the shallower water and engaged the walking or swimming crusaders as they trudged forward, while other Muslim missile troops continued to direct fire at them.

At length, enough crusaders reached the shore to engage the defenders in melee combat, killing them and their horses.³¹ Louis himself, against all advice from his advisors, jumped into the water and waded toward the beach. This act later earned him praise in a sermon written by fourteenth-century Dominican preacher Jacob of Lausanne: “The first point of blessed Louis’ strength was that he fought [pugnavit] against the enemy.”³² An extant letter of Louis’ royal chamberlain, John Sarrasin, claims that three emirs died in the fighting, and Muslim sources confirm the identities of two of them, Najm al-Din and al-Waziri.³³ Eventually, all the defenders were repulsed. Fakhr al-Din led the retreat to the east bank of the Nile and then south to Damietta, having lost hundreds of men. Both Western and Eastern sources agree that crusader casualties were light, which seems remarkable given the confusion of the situation and their lack of training for amphibious assault.

Praise for the Cross

Western sources credited the True Cross for this stunningly successful operation. Its role is spelled out in successive accounts. Robert of Artois, in his letter to Louis IX’s mother, Queen Blanche, notes the “help of the triumphant Cross” in enabling a slaughter of the shore defenders.³⁴ Vincent of Beauvais calls attention to the Cross’s “power” as the crusaders advanced and showered the shore with suppressive fire.³⁵ John of Sarrasin praises the “strength” of the Cross, which enabled the crusaders to do three things: advance with difficulty through the water, get their horses out of the small boats and lead them to shore, and increase their rate of suppressive fire to cover those wading ashore.³⁶ None of these blessings relate to esprit de corps. If they did, one would expect to see reference to crusaders working together or, perhaps, remarks about their remarkable endurance and resolve (i.e., their mindset). Instead, these accounts speak of their efficacious actions: the intensification of their martial deeds and the amplification of their killing blows.

The authors above read the True Cross as multiplying crusaders’ deeds at two levels of war. First, one must consider the operation itself. Louis’s original plan called for, in modern terms, a “ship-to-shore” operation “to land troops, equipment, and supplies at the prescribed times, places, and in the formation required.”³⁷ Here, the crusaders planned to shift personnel, horses, and materiel from round ships to smaller landing craft. These craft would then row until running aground, at which point men and supplies would disembark. However, the presence of the Ayyubid soldiers altered the operating environment—Louis now confronted the prospect of an amphibious assault, described in joint doctrine thusly:

An AF [amphibious force] launches an amphibious assault from the sea to employ an LF [landing force] on a hostile or potentially hostile shore. Amphibious assaults require the rapid buildup of combat power ashore, from an initial zero capability to full coordinated striking power, as the attack progresses toward AF objectives.³⁸

These are two very different types of operations. And while ship-to-shore operations occurred on a routine basis, in a vast myriad of seaborne and river-crossing movements during the Middle Ages, amphibious assaults did not.³⁹ They were certainly not unheard of. For example, Robert Guiscard, the count of Apulia and Calabria, had launched a series of amphibious assaults on Byzantium in the late eleventh century.⁴⁰ The men of the Seventh Crusade, however, were neither accustomed to nor trained for littoral operations. An example at comparable scale, the Fourth Crusade, differed in terms of time. In 1204, the crusaders and allied Venetian soldiers had all of February and March to plan their amphibious assault on Constantinople, while in 1249, Louis had exactly one day to prepare—while already at sea.⁴¹ Witnesses therefore credited the Cross with helping him to execute an unfamiliar and hasty sort of operation.

Tactically, this constituted a combined arms affair. Rowers, knights, and missile troops worked in a synchronized fashion to conduct the assault. Fires suppressed the shore defenses and knights held off the cavalry, while follow-on forces moved forward to disembark. At this level, witnesses credited the True Cross with boosting the ability of crusaders to perform a variety of tactics. Those men rowing and commanding the small boats took evasive action as they guided vessels toward the occupied shore. The knights, encumbered by their heavy armor and weapons, plunged into deep water but mostly survived a slow slog toward land. Others somehow unloaded cargo while struggling in the water, including horses—a job that probably resulted in a chaotic and dangerous scene of whinnying and thrashing legs and hooves. The French crossbowmen were particularly singled out in the letter of John Sarrasin. Loading and reloading their weapons on rocking boats, their suppressive fire drove some defenders away, and they even increased their rate of fire as the operation progressed.⁴² Knights reaching the shore, such as those in Joinville’s retinue, effectively set up a fortified beachhead with shields and tents, masking them as targets, driving off at least two cavalry charges, and providing rallying points. All of these actions took place while the landing force moved under active fire.

Conclusions

The Western sources for the Seventh Crusade roundly credit Louis IX’s fragment of the True Cross relic with enabling his men to gain situational awareness, adapt to a changed operational environment, and then outperform their training to fight better and kill faster. The purported blessings of the True Cross constituted, in their minds, a combat multiplier that increased their lethality and enabled their victory. Its presence was not just symbolic. Modern readers can, of course, express skepticism as to whether the Cross actually, miraculously, blessed the crusaders and magnified their martial efforts (or even if the fragments came from the actual cross of Jesus in the first place). Yet this is rather beside the point—eyewitnesses and participants believed that it did, and their shared perception of the relic’s power led to the interpretation of its decisive role. It is therefore not hard to see why its manifest powers warranted its ubiquitous presence on campaigns in the Latin East.

But why should modern military professionals care about the Seventh Crusade or religious relics in war outside of potential curiosity or scorn for superstition? The first reason is the historical. Studies of littoral warfare typically center on the very modern, often starting with Gallipoli (1915–1916) and then moving forward into the European and Pacific theaters in World War II.⁴³ Rarer examples have endeavored to examine earlier wars.⁴⁴ The Seventh Crusade is evidence, however, that the problem sets of contested beach landings are not limited to only the twentieth century, and the modern force could profit from studying older, lesser-known examples of amphibious assaults. Combined arms operations are not the exclusive purview of the modern age. Second, beyond the similarities with modern battles like Tarawa, the crusade poses questions about forced adaptation in contested environments, when soldiers and leaders are forced to make quick decisions and improvise in unfamiliar and untrained-for operational environments.

Finally, some may be unaware that religious artifacts—despite their association with premodern, holy wars—are still deployed in modern conflicts. Russia is a prime example. Prior to engaging Napoleon at Borodino in September 1812, Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov ordered the Icon of the Black Virgin of Smolensk paraded through his army while priests sprinkled holy water and lit incense.⁴⁵ More recently, a True Cross fragment aboard the Russian flagship Moskva fell prey to Ukrainian missiles in 2022, and in February 2025, Russian priests attempted to protect oil refineries in Ryazan Oblast from drone strikes by flying pieces of the Cross in its airspace.⁴⁶ The power of relics to affect soldier morale and lethality, while perhaps a quaint notion to some, has nonetheless endured as an unquestioned reality in the eyes of modern armies.

 

I thank my Department of Military History colleagues John Kuehn and William Nance for their assistance with this article.

 

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Notes

• Epigraph. Joseph Alexander, Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa (Naval Institute Press, 1999), 73.

1. Christopher Kyle Hemler, Delivering Destruction: American Firepower and Amphibious Assault from Tarawa to Iwo Jima (Naval Institute Press, 2023), 44–45.
2. Alexander, Utmost Savagery, 249.
3. “David Monroe Shoup,” Congressional Medal of Honor Society, accessed 20 August 2025, https://www.cmohs.org/recipients/david-m-shoup.
4. Marines Corps Reference Publication 1-10.2, Marines Corps Supplement to the DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 2020), II-15.
5. Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” in The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254: Sources and Documents, trans. Peter Jackson (Ashgate, 2007), 123.
6. Milan Vego, “On Littoral Warfare,” Naval War College Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 16.
7. Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 122–23.
8. Beth C. Spacey, The Miraculous and the Writing of Crusade Narrative (Boydell Press, 2020); Andrea J. Andrea and Andrew Holt, Sanctified Violence: Holy War in World History (Hackett Publishing, 2021).
9. Judith Mary Upton-Ward, ed. and trans., The Rule of the Templars (Boydell Press, 1992), para. 122.
10. David S. Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War: c.300–c.1215 (Boydell Press, 2003), 91, 154.
11. William, Archbishop of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. Emily Babcock and A. C. Krey, vol. 2 (Octagon Books, 1943), 154.
12. Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession (U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], 2019), 6-7.
13. Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton University Press, 2013), 321–24.
14. An Act to Amend the Act Approved February 4, 1919 (40 Stat. 1056), Pub. L. No. 702, 56 Stat. 743 (1942).
15. Jean de Joinville and Geoffrey Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, ed. and trans. Caroline Smith (Penguin, 2009), 182.
16. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 182, pegs the number at 1,800; on the ship types, see John H. Pryor, “Transportation of Horses at Sea during the Era of the Crusades: Eighth Century to 1285 AD. Part II: 1222-1285,” Mariner’s Mirror 68 (1982): 103–4.
17. Pryor, “Transportation of Horses,” 103.
18. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 182–83.
19. “Ibn Wāṣil, Mufarrij al-kurūb fī akhbār banī Ayyūb,” in The Seventh Crusade, 130.
20. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 183.
21. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 183; “Ibn Wāṣil,” 130. Vincent of Beauvais has it slightly different, with Louis deciding to seize the shore but with no mention of his spotting the enemy beforehand; see Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 122.
22. Joinville gives the figure of six thousand, see Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 184. A letter written by John of Sarrasin, copied into the “Rothelin” continuation of William of Tyre, counts only two thousand, see Janet Shirley, trans., Crusader Syria in the Thirteenth Century (Ashgate, 1999), 86; in Old French, see “Continuation de Guillaume de Tyr, de 1229 a 1261, dite du manuscript de Rothelin,” in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Occidentaux, vol. 2 (Imprimerie Impériale, 1859), 590.
23. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 183. Such operations were not unheard of at the time, although perhaps not at this scale. In 1205, for example, two Venetian galleys offloaded two hundred bales of cotton from a sinking navi; see John E. Dotson, “Ship Types and Fleet Composition at Genoa and Venice in the Early Thirteenth Century,” in Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. J. H. Pryor (Ashgate, 2006), 67.
24. Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86; Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 123.
25. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, “Louis IX and the Triumphal Cross of Constantine,” French Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (February 2023): 11.
26. Mattheaei Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Richards Luard, vol. 6 (London, 1882), 84; Gaposchkin, “Louis IX,” 20–22.
27. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 184.
28. Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 185.
29. “Robert, Count of Artois, to Queen Blanche, 23 June 1249,” in The Seventh Crusade, 84; Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, 154; see also Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86.
30. Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86.
31. Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 122.
32. Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86; Joinville and Villehardouin, Chronicles of the Crusades, 185; quote from M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Blessed Louis, the Most Glorious of Kings: Texts Relating to the Cult of Saint Louis of France (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 258–59.
33. Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86; R. J. C. Broadhurst, trans., A History of the Ayyūbid Sultans of Egypt, Translated from the Arabic of al-Maqrīzī (Twayne, 1980), 289–90; Vincent de Beauvais, “Ibn Wāṣil,” 130; Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 123.
34. “Robert, Count of Artois,” 84.
35. Vincent de Beauvais, “Speculum historiale,” 123.
36. “Continuation de Guillaume de Tyr,” 590. The relative increase in fighting efficacy was noticed in the early fourteenth-century work of Marino Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross: Liber secretorum fidelium Cruces, trans. Peter Lock (Ashgate, 2011), 346.
37. Joint Publication (JP) 3-02, Amphibious Operations (U.S. GPO, 2025), IV-32.
38. JP 3-02, Amphibious Operations, II-1.
39. On river crossings, see John D. Hosler, “Gap Crossing Operations: Medieval and Modern,” Military Review 100, no. 2 (March-April 2020): 57–65.
40. Charles D. Stanton, Norman Naval Operations in the Mediterranean (Boydell, 2011), 47–58.
41. Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 176–77. It was likewise different from the Genoese attack on Ceuta in 1234, which consisted exclusively of shipborne artillery; see Dotson, “Ship Types,” 69.
42. On horses and crossbows, see Shirley, Crusader Syria, 86; and “Continuation de Guillaume de Tyr,” 590.
43. One example is Ian Speller and Christopher Tuck, Amphibious Warfare: Strategy and Tactics from Gallipoli to Iraq (Amber Books, 2014).
44. See Merrill L. Bartlett, ed., Assault from the Sea: Essays on the History of Amphibious Warfare (Naval Institute Press, 1983); or Roger Keyes, Amphibious Warfare and Combined Operations (Macmillan, 1943).
45. Alexander Mikaberidze, Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2022), 381–82.
46. Michael Starr, “Sunken Russian Warship May Have Carried Christian Relic ‘True Cross’ Piece,” The Jerusalem Post, 18 April 2022; “Ukrainian Drones Attacked Rosneft’s Largest Oil Refinery for the Third Time this Month,” The Odessa Journal, 24 February 2025; on icons during the Ukraine-Russia conflict more broadly, see Amy Singleton Adams, “War and Peace: Orthodox Icons and Putin’s Politics of the Sacred,” Slavic Review 82, no. 2 (2023): 447–73.

 

 

 

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