We continue our grand campaign covering the Crusades, playing on tactical level all the major battles as depicted in Crusades expansion for Commands & Colors Medieval. So far we went through the initial engagement – Nicaea (1097 AD) – then the first major battle in three chronological scenarios – Dorylaeum (1097 AD) – and finally the long agony of Antioch (1098 AD) closed by Ascalon. At the end of that last report I promised that the battles which came after the First Crusade were much more balanced. Time to prove it!
Today we have something a bit unusual – all three scenarios are fought on the same ground. Ramla was a small town sitting on the road between Jerusalem and Ascalon, and Ascalon was the strongest fortress the Fatimids still held in Palestine. From there the vizier al-Afdal sent an army north almost every single year between 1099 and 1107. Three of those expeditions ran straight into King Baldwin I at Ramla, in 1101, 1102 and 1105. Same town, same road, three completely different battles.
That is actually a pattern you meet again and again in military history, and it always fascinated me. Geography does not move. A ford, a pass, a crossroads or a coastal road stays exactly where it is, so armies keep colliding in the same few places century after century. The extreme case must be Adrianople, today’s Edirne – a dozen or more recorded battles and sieges spread over roughly sixteen hundred years, from Constantine and Licinius, through the catastrophe of Valens in 378, the Bulgarians, the Latin Empire, the Ottomans, and all the way to the Balkan Wars of 1913.
In the twentieth century we got Ypres and the Isonzo, where the Great War generals simply numbered the battles because they ran out of names, and Kharkov, fought over four times in three years. Compared to that, three battles at Ramla in four years is almost modest – but it does make for a very nice mini-campaign.
The three scenarios we played were:
- 108 1st Ramla – 7 September 1101 – where a ridiculously outnumbered Baldwin I feeds his divisions into the Egyptian army one by one, and somehow comes out on top
- 109 2nd Ramla – 17 May 1102 – where the same Baldwin tries the same trick with knights only, no infantry, and pays the full price for it
- 111 3rd Ramla – 27 August 1105 – the biggest and bloodiest of the three, with Turkish horse archers now reinforcing the Fatimid army
Lukasz took the Crusaders for the whole evening, I commanded the Fatimids. Ok, so without further delay, let me invite you to the beginning of the 12th century AD, Kingdom of Jerusalem!
Some of my materials for great Crusaders expansion:
108 1st Ramla – 7 September 1101
Historical background
In the late summer of 1101 the Egyptian army moved north from Ascalon under Sa’d al-Dawla al-Qawwasi, a veteran commander whose nickname meant simply “the archer”. Baldwin I marched down to Ramla to block the road with what was, even by the standards of the young Kingdom of Jerusalem, a tiny force – the chroniclers speak of some 260 knights and 900 foot soldiers against an Egyptian army several times that size.
Baldwin split his men into six small divisions and committed them one after another. The leading ones were simply swept away. But when the Egyptians broke the third division and scattered in pursuit of it, Baldwin threw in everything he had left. The counter-charge went home, the Egyptian army came apart and streamed back towards Ascalon, and the Crusaders returned to plunder the abandoned camp. It was a victory – but such a narrow one that, as Fulcher of Chartres put it, nobody on the field knew during the day how it would end.
Session report
This is a scenario where the two armies could hardly be less alike. I had numbers – a long line of foot supported by cavalry on both wings, spilling from one edge of the board to the other. Lukasz had a small, compact fist of much better troops sitting in the center. In this system that usually means one thing: he will try to punch a hole and I have to make sure the hole closes behind him.
109 2nd Ramla – 17 May 1102
Historical background
Eight months later al-Afdal sent another army north, roughly the same size as the one beaten in 1101, this time commanded by his own son. Baldwin convinced himself he was looking at nothing more than a raiding party. He did not wait for his infantry, he did not wait for the reinforcements on their way, and with only a few hundred knights – Stephen of Blois and Stephen of Burgundy riding with him – he went straight at the Egyptian center, hoping to repeat the previous year’s miracle.
This time there was no infantry to soak up the pressure and no second wave to save the day. The charge was swallowed whole and only a handful of knights got clear. Baldwin was among them: he hid in the tower of Ramla, slipped out under cover of night with a scribe and a single knight, and reached the safety of Arsuf two days later, exhausted and half starved. The knights he left behind in the tower eventually charged out to their deaths. Stephen of Blois did not come home either.
Session report
This was the scenario I was most curious about, because on paper it looks completely broken – and then you realize that is exactly the point. Lukasz gets a handful of mounted units and three leaders, nothing else, against my full army. The scenario special rules turn his commanders into the real objective: each Crusader leader eliminated is worth two Victory Banners to me, and even a leader who evades off the battlefield hands me one. My own light cavalry, on the other hand, may not feign retreat here, so the usual Fatimid tricks were off the table.
111 3rd Ramla – 27 August 1105
Historical background
Three years on, the yearly Egyptian expedition came up the coast again, but this time both sides had learned something. Baldwin I brought a proper combined army – knights, other cavalry and around two thousand foot. The Fatimid commander, Sama’ al-Mulk, brought something the Crusaders had never faced at Ramla before: a contingent of Turkish horse archers sent by Toghtekin of Damascus. The Franks had a healthy respect for Egyptian infantry, but they had a real fear of Turkish riders, and they knew precisely what those men could do to a formed line.
For once the Fatimids absorbed the first Crusader charge and held. The fighting dragged on for hours, with the Turkish horse archers repeatedly trying to work around the Crusader flank in their favorite manner, and being turned back every time. In the end Baldwin drove the Egyptians from the field once more, but his army was too badly mauled to follow them. It was the bloodiest of the three battles at Ramla, and it did not stop the annual raids one bit.
Session report
The last scenario of the evening was also by far the biggest – two full armies facing each other across the whole board. And this time the scenario tilts things back the other way: the Relic rule is in effect for Lukasz, and he gets four Inspired Action tokens against my three. The Turkish contingent gave me a genuinely different tool, because those light bow cavalry units, being Turkish, are allowed to feign retreat while the rest of my light cavalry is not. Nice little detail that rewards you for keeping track of who is who in your own army.
Summary
That closed our three scenario mini-campaign covering the battles of Ramla. As always we had fun both from the gaming side and from reenacting the history, and this time the final tally looked very different from the Antioch evening:
- Crusaders 13 – Fatimids 15
Two Fatimid wins and one Crusader win, and a total that could hardly be closer. Exactly what I promised at the end of the Antioch report – the post-First Crusade battles are much better balanced than the early ones, where the knights simply rolled over everything in their path. History was reversed once, in 1101, and respected twice.
Playing all three Ramla scenarios back to back is something I would recommend to anybody who owns this expansion. Because the ground stays the same and only the armies change, you get a very clear feeling for what actually decided these battles – whether Baldwin brought his infantry along, whether the Egyptians had Turkish riders with them, and how much room the Crusader knights were given to build up their charge. Richard Borg does that kind of thing very well, and here you get the lesson three times in one evening.
More session reports to come!
Michal, you, with your small band of thinkers, are becoming an institution, the Herodotus-and-Thucydides of board wargaming. One thing that elevates your work is your commitment to the history over and above the gaming. As a faithful follower of Dunnigan, Herman, Miranda, et al., one thing that always concerns me is the validity of the historical and technical model governing any wargame (rules & quantification), even simple ones suitable for youth education.
So, since you frequently return to the Borg corpus (a chronicle in its own way, but as always, a medium to explore historical causality and plausible alternative outcomes) let me ask: how valid do you deem the underlying model, in this medieval edition and his others using the core rule set? For instance, were one to conduct the same battles here and using ‘Men of Iron: Infidel’, could one expect a similar range/distribution of likely outcomes? (Hard to really compare after only a few runs, but one can usually get a sense of how more repetitions would wind up).
Thanks, Tim in Maryland