What do you think?
Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land
A vivid new history of the criminal underworld in the medieval Holy Land
The religious wars of the crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence.
In the first history of its kind, Steve Tibble explores the criminal underbelly of the crusades. From gangsters and bandits to muggers and pirates, Tibble presents extraordinary evidence of an illicit underworld. He shows how the real problem in the region stemmed not from religion but from young men. Dislocated, disinhibited, and present in disturbingly large numbers, they were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.
Crusader Criminals charts the downward spiral of desensitisation that grew out of the horrors of incessant warfare—and in doing so uncovers some of the most surprising stories of the time.
The religious wars of the crusades are renowned for their military engagements. But the period was witness to brutality beyond the battlefield. More so than any other medieval war zone, the Holy Land was rife with unprecedented levels of criminality and violence.
In the first history of its kind, Steve Tibble explores the criminal underbelly of the crusades. From gangsters and bandits to muggers and pirates, Tibble presents extraordinary evidence of an illicit underworld. He shows how the real problem in the region stemmed not from religion but from young men. Dislocated, disinhibited, and present in disturbingly large numbers, they were the propellant that stoked two centuries of unceasing warfare and shocking levels of criminality.
Crusader Criminals charts the downward spiral of desensitisation that grew out of the horrors of incessant warfare—and in doing so uncovers some of the most surprising stories of the time.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published August 6, 2024
About the author
Steve Tibble
6 books17 followersSteve Tibble is honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of Monarchy and Lordships in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1099–1291. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 18, 2024
This book showcases a different side to the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Whilst a little repetitive at times, I found it a very interesting read.
July 16, 2026
Come al solito bellissima disamina, condita in questo testo da succosi dettagli storici. Tibble è una garanzia.
August 26, 2026
Micro history is cool! There are some fun examples used in this book, and though not all of them are strictly related to crusading or, indeed, crime necessarily, they are generally entertaining.
I also note as a positive that some of the examples given are here for the first time discussed and published about in English. For example, Boukat the ‘Madman’ of Aleppo, a relatively minor but interesting man who started as a criminal but became the equivalent of the city’s chief of police. The tale is told in Kemal al-Din’s Chronicle of Aleppo, which has never been published in English. Tibble has plucked it from obscurity, and it is a genuinely great example of a known criminal-made-good who operated in the crusading era.
Mind you, as I’ll mention later, I fear that Tibble might be working from the French translation only rather than referring to the Arabic manuscripts. The Madman had a wild and tragic end, captured and set to awful torture while he sneered that his life had been hard enough that such things were nothing to him, not anymore.
That seems a pertinent data point! It was also left out of the French translation, which carefully selected extracts to minimise violence and sex, given it was published in the 19th century. Ah well.
There are some (invariably French) sources that are used often and quite well, namely John de Joinville’s record of the Seventh Crusade.
Tibble also tries his hand at a wider analysis on wider societal shifts due to economic drivers, some of which is good and mostly accurate.
‘The quality and sophistication of justice was inevitably closely related to economic productivity. The low productivity of medieval societies was exacerbated in the Middle East by the demands of endemic warfare – the needs of the military soaked up most of what extra money was produced. The siphoning of that (generally very meagre) economic surplus away from the needs of civil society was hugely limiting.’
In places it can verge on retreading well established ground with the shock and enthusiasm of a children’s TV presenter. Droughts and economic collapse in the Abbasid caliphate, leading to massive influxes of formerly nomadic fighters to encroach and form their own splinter kingdoms, very much was a reason for the success of the First Crusade! It’s not as ground-breaking a claim as Tibble makes it out to be, but yep! But it could be that Tibble is targeting a younger crowd and trying to whip up their interest by presenting some claims – such as the crusades being motivated by non-religious beliefs, and the soldiers being not very nice while doing it – as more controversial than they actually ae.
I do think that this book has enough intrigue and is about a niche and interesting enough topic that it will garner interest from a wider audience, and that’s always a good thing. Everyone get into the crusades NOW, I have things to discuss with you!
There’s not a nice way to say it, but the quality and style of the writing varies so massively – from unreadable slop to good – that I have to assume Tibble had more help than a solely-listed author really ought to.
Let me give an example of, in my opinion, the bargain basement of writing quality:
‘Not all men were criminals; but the vast majority of criminals were men – particularly young men with access to arms. The population shifts experienced during the period of the crusades were not normal – and neither was the effect they had on the societies which tried to absorb them. Extraordinary demographic movements had a hugely distorting impact on Medieval Middle Eastern societies – and the inexorable nature of these shifts became ever more apparent over time. These groups were mainly drawn from the archetypal demographic of criminality – overwhelmingly male, young, unrestrained and heavily armed. The proportion of these men in the population of the Middle East as a whole, and the new Christian states in particular, was vastly increased. This had profound consequences – obvious on reflection, but generally overlooked in the history books of the crusades.
Stinky, stinky dashes. I haven’t modified this in the slightly btw.
Mind you, I – like anyone insufferable – love an en dash. I use them to death. But 5 times out of 6 sentences? 4 sentences in a row? And mind you, empty sentences that communicate very little?
Christ, he even uses a dash for no reason in the chapter title ‘Gangsters – and Prisoners of War’. Someone take this man’s keyboard away from him.
So some of the writing was slop, and that’s quite a word to use. Am I implying he used AI? I think I’m open to the belief but I won’t claim it, because in order to confidently say one way or the other I would have to look at his previous publications before LLMs were publicly available in order to compare and contrast, and I simply will never be reading anything from this author again.
Here is an example from later in the book where the writing quality suddenly dramatically improves:
‘With sex between a knight and a peasant woman, for instance, issues of consent are often hard to judge: the boundaries between a coercive and a consensual liaison are almost impossible to determine from this distance. The line between coercion and consent were further blurred by the issue of definition. Rape in medieval Europe was never an easy crime to classify. Religious law (that is, canon law) said that extramarital sex was wrong; secular law said that violence was wrong.’
Wow. Insightful. Each sentence communicates something. Efficient. You know the meme of Homer Simpson saying ‘that’s a good looking grill – why doesn’t mine look like that???’. Yeah. That.
Why would this be? Did they rush publication so fast that the Editors didn’t get a chance to even out the rough edges? Did different people work on different chapters, where some collaborators really rewrote the base chapter but some just gave some pointers and bounced? Like, was it actually a different person who wrote this?
Strangely, this chapter – the highest quality, by some margin – ends with an intriguing paragraph:
‘Perhaps surprisingly, this is the last time we will look at sexual violence in this book. It was so prevalent and so unremittingly depressing to write about that I have not included it further. For our current purposes, however, it is important to remember that its absence from the text in no way suggests that it was absent from society. On the contrary, the reality – or very real threat – of sexual violence was everywhere.’
He does go on to mention rape and sexual violence again, after this unique instance of breaking the authorial fourth wall, though not with the insightful and sharp voice that this chapter – alone – has. Interestingly, this would also be a way to tacitly acknowledge that a published chapter contains knowledge that the author does not themselves possess and cannot be expected to reappear again. Hmm.
We can’t know, I guess. It certainly is noticeable and distracting, but maybe only if you’re a persnickety audience member. Or a woman, I suppose.
So the first couple of SERIOUS complaints which in my opinion are very defensible are as follows: precising definitions and bioessentialism.
Starting with the first one. Maybe this is a me problem, but if I pick up a book that is called ‘Crusader Criminals’ I would kind of expect the author to define what they mean by crusaders, and what they mean by criminals.
After all, soldiers burning, pillaging, raping, and killing was often entirely legal. Can their behaviour be labelled as criminal? What about monks breaking their vows? Does it even make sense to discuss their actions alongside the petty crimes which everyone knew and accepted were crimes under the law?
As far as Tibble seems to believe, a crime is something that is violent, including robbery, but also legal gambling, because it was dangerous, and also Templars breaking their vows, because I don’t know. I say that based on what he included in the book – including those fully legally and religiously sanctified acts of violence – not based on anything he explicitly says. This is an absurd little hole to leave in the analysis and allows a certain bloat.
Worse, maybe, or at least more irritating, Tibble also doesn’t define what he means by ‘crusaders’.
You’ll find that he generally means men travelling to or ruling in Outremer, though he again doesn’t say that. RIP the northern, Albigensian, and Spanish crusaders – people will take you seriously one day. But though the decision not to explicitly lay out what he’s actually talking about may have been an oversight, it kind of feels purposeful when it comes to refusing to lay out a distinct time period.
Many of the examples Tibble gives are European examples dating to well, WELL after the crusading period. For example, when talking about the dangers of drinking and how it could be linked to violence, he cites a case from 26 August 1379.
13 fucking 79?
That’s like using an example from WWII to explain warfare in the Crimean war. In still another example, Tibble again launders data from completely different periods, claiming that they are contemporary:
‘Crime data is always problematic: we have no quantitative figures for the crusader states, for instance, but contemporary case studies in European societies shed light on the gender patterns underlying violent offences. In mid-thirteenth-century England, less than 10% of the people accused of murder were female. Similarly, in France, the court records for the period 1389-1422 show that women represented only 4% of petitioners seeking a pardon for serious crimes.’
Girl. Mid-thirteenth-century, fine. It’s laaate in the crusading period, a couple of generations removed from the loss of Jerusalem. But why include the data from 1389-1422??? Over a hundred years after the last toehold of Outremer was lost, nearly 100 years after the Templars were disbanded (violently) by the French. No one alive in 1389-1422 was a crusader in the sense of having lived in or ruled over anywhere in Outremer. This is not contemporaneous data and it would be better to have stopped at ‘we have no quantitative figures’.
My sneaking suspicion, having realised there was a bit of a pattern to the sources used, is that Tibble might be able to access/use French sources only. This is just an assumption, but the number of shoehorned examples which were from 13th or 14th century France is notable, as is the use of a limited number of Arabic sources, almost all of which are available in French translation.
There’s nothing wrong with writing history with limited language skills, but I do think there is something wrong with blurring the lines between time periods and culture to present data, examples, and people as though they are relevant when they are not.
My second big gripe is a continuous, aggressive bioessentialism. Tibble seems to genuinely believe that testosterone makes men evil. I started counting how many times he actually used the word ‘testosterone’ but lost count at 9.
Men are overwhelmingly the main perpetrators of crime, especially violent crime. That’s not in question.
What I do question, and find uncomfortable, is ascribing this to the ‘unrestraining’ effects of testosterone rather than, say, a religio-social framework of control that trained women to perform subservience and men to expect dominance, with violence seen as the natural corrective for failing to achieve your gendered role.
There is only one passage in the entire book that realistically assesses the behaviour of men as a social expectation and tied to classist and misogynistic beliefs, rather than, like. In-built into men, somehow. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it appears in the chapter which covers gendered violence against women which I questioned above as to whether it was written by someone else, given the different writing style and quality on show.
Outside of that one chapter, for Tibble:
‘Wilder elite males’ have ‘predatory inclinations’
‘Armed men’ have ‘violent tendencies’
‘The connection between testosterone, alcohol and aggression is clear’
Encouraging or ordering criminals to join crusades sent them to ‘places where they might do something more useful with their testosterone.’
At one point, he even exclaims that ‘the mind boggles’ at the concept of crusading knights reading romantic novels.
Look, I’m as anti-men as the next lesbian and even I think he’s taking this too far.
Painting testosterone as a kind of chemical X that poisons your bloodstream with the capacity to commit evil is itself deeply misogynistic and also trans/homophobic. It creates an almost magical explanation for violence without critiquing the societal structures underpinning it, creating a kind of fatalism about ‘male evil’ that can’t really be justified in a world where queer and trans people also exist. Male violence is a complex social phenomenon, not a biological mechanism.
Pretending that male violence is inevitable is also part of a carceral mindset. If you believe that a man, when given the opportunity, will always be an aggressor, then you will only be able to imagine dealing with him through punishment, control, or even anticipative violence. There is no place for compassion. There is no place for alternative justice systems, or a reduction of state violence in response.
For me personally, there are some examples of violence against others that are unforgiveable – sorry Angela Davis, I respect you so so so much – but painting all male violence as biologically determined is insane.
It is also swiftly becoming a bit of a dog whistle for the far right.
This is where I’m getting to my complaint which might be a bit of a stretch. Stay with me girl. Immigration is the absolute far right darling right now, as a concept. It’s been so easy for them to turn it into a culture war topic of such fierce debate that the Overton window has completely shifted on how migrants and refugees are discussed in public, in parliament, on TV. One of their favourite refrains lately is to comment under images of migrants, say the ones recently involved in a mass migration attempt in Cueta, something to the effect of ‘they’re all young men of fighting age.’
The implication is that some nefarious global plot is afoot to ‘replace’ young men with virile migrants operating as an occupying force who will rape their women and take their jobs, of course.
I wouldn’t normally connect an author making weird bioessentialist comments with a currently very popular right wing talking point about migration, were it not for two little comments that put my teeth on edge.
The first comes early on in the book:
‘Most obviously, there was the increased predisposition of young armed men to take advantage of civilian populations when the opportunity presented itself. (One only has to look at the newspaper headlines of any modern war zone, any narco-controlled area in South America, or any long-running uprising in Africa to see the depressingly consistent nature of that male exploitation.)’
Narco-states and African uprisings… right, right… and you couldn’t think of recent, high-profile cases of any other young armed men taking advantage of civilians? Nothing from the Ukraine war, maybe? Nothing about Israeli genocide? No wild ICE recruitment drives putting untrained, bigoted idiots with guns on the streets and directly leading to high-profile murders in plain daylight? Hmm.
My suspicion was a little piqued. I really am wondering if I was primed to hear dog whistles on the wind, or if he really meant it that way, but the final endpiece of the book made me look around for the nearest trusted adult to confirm that this was, in fact, far right rhetoric:
‘This book… has been the story of how climate change and migration – forces so vast as to be almost invisible to the actors on the ground – can have a profoundly scarring effect on civil society; and of how a monumental gathering of ‘the usual suspects’, irrespective of religion or ethnicity, creates a maelstrom of criminality and pushes local communities to the brink of collapse. These men were not just vastly overrepresented in the population: they also had a negative halo effect on the rest of society. They made poor behaviour the norm, and other social groups inevitably felt empowered to join them… Modern societies face some disturbingly parallel issues of climate change and its knock-on effects. Importantly, we now have the technology and resources to understand these macro drivers with far greater clarity: unlike the crusaders, we have the luxury of knowledge and economic surplus. But that knowledge is rarely translated into strategy or action. We would do well to reflect on the profoundly negative consequences of failing to address these issues with sufficient foresight and sensitivity.’
Am I being crazy? Probably. But go woke or go broke, IMO.
Crusader Criminals is a deeply frustrating book. The subject itself is fascinating and occasionally there’s a fun, distracting little anecdote about a guy called ‘Madman’ being outrageously corrupt and murdering a vizier over some rugs. But the delivery method is sloppy; an ill-defined scope, uneven writing, and an obsession with the malign effects of testosterone all undercut the vision. The result is a book that gestures to methodology, but does not engage.
Unfortunately, some good stories and an interesting hook idea do not a sophisticated history make. I got some enjoyment out of it, but ultimately the central analytical framework is too shaky. Like a fairground ride that comes out of a suitcase, the target audience might be 15 year olds who are here to egg each other on and throw up down the side of the teacups – but I don’t trust it, and you’re not getting my rickety bones strapped in without a fight. There is a good book to be written about crime in the crusading world, but it is not this one and, in my opinion, it is not this writer either.
I also note as a positive that some of the examples given are here for the first time discussed and published about in English. For example, Boukat the ‘Madman’ of Aleppo, a relatively minor but interesting man who started as a criminal but became the equivalent of the city’s chief of police. The tale is told in Kemal al-Din’s Chronicle of Aleppo, which has never been published in English. Tibble has plucked it from obscurity, and it is a genuinely great example of a known criminal-made-good who operated in the crusading era.
Mind you, as I’ll mention later, I fear that Tibble might be working from the French translation only rather than referring to the Arabic manuscripts. The Madman had a wild and tragic end, captured and set to awful torture while he sneered that his life had been hard enough that such things were nothing to him, not anymore.
That seems a pertinent data point! It was also left out of the French translation, which carefully selected extracts to minimise violence and sex, given it was published in the 19th century. Ah well.
There are some (invariably French) sources that are used often and quite well, namely John de Joinville’s record of the Seventh Crusade.
Tibble also tries his hand at a wider analysis on wider societal shifts due to economic drivers, some of which is good and mostly accurate.
‘The quality and sophistication of justice was inevitably closely related to economic productivity. The low productivity of medieval societies was exacerbated in the Middle East by the demands of endemic warfare – the needs of the military soaked up most of what extra money was produced. The siphoning of that (generally very meagre) economic surplus away from the needs of civil society was hugely limiting.’
In places it can verge on retreading well established ground with the shock and enthusiasm of a children’s TV presenter. Droughts and economic collapse in the Abbasid caliphate, leading to massive influxes of formerly nomadic fighters to encroach and form their own splinter kingdoms, very much was a reason for the success of the First Crusade! It’s not as ground-breaking a claim as Tibble makes it out to be, but yep! But it could be that Tibble is targeting a younger crowd and trying to whip up their interest by presenting some claims – such as the crusades being motivated by non-religious beliefs, and the soldiers being not very nice while doing it – as more controversial than they actually ae.
I do think that this book has enough intrigue and is about a niche and interesting enough topic that it will garner interest from a wider audience, and that’s always a good thing. Everyone get into the crusades NOW, I have things to discuss with you!
There’s not a nice way to say it, but the quality and style of the writing varies so massively – from unreadable slop to good – that I have to assume Tibble had more help than a solely-listed author really ought to.
Let me give an example of, in my opinion, the bargain basement of writing quality:
‘Not all men were criminals; but the vast majority of criminals were men – particularly young men with access to arms. The population shifts experienced during the period of the crusades were not normal – and neither was the effect they had on the societies which tried to absorb them. Extraordinary demographic movements had a hugely distorting impact on Medieval Middle Eastern societies – and the inexorable nature of these shifts became ever more apparent over time. These groups were mainly drawn from the archetypal demographic of criminality – overwhelmingly male, young, unrestrained and heavily armed. The proportion of these men in the population of the Middle East as a whole, and the new Christian states in particular, was vastly increased. This had profound consequences – obvious on reflection, but generally overlooked in the history books of the crusades.
Stinky, stinky dashes. I haven’t modified this in the slightly btw.
Mind you, I – like anyone insufferable – love an en dash. I use them to death. But 5 times out of 6 sentences? 4 sentences in a row? And mind you, empty sentences that communicate very little?
Christ, he even uses a dash for no reason in the chapter title ‘Gangsters – and Prisoners of War’. Someone take this man’s keyboard away from him.
So some of the writing was slop, and that’s quite a word to use. Am I implying he used AI? I think I’m open to the belief but I won’t claim it, because in order to confidently say one way or the other I would have to look at his previous publications before LLMs were publicly available in order to compare and contrast, and I simply will never be reading anything from this author again.
Here is an example from later in the book where the writing quality suddenly dramatically improves:
‘With sex between a knight and a peasant woman, for instance, issues of consent are often hard to judge: the boundaries between a coercive and a consensual liaison are almost impossible to determine from this distance. The line between coercion and consent were further blurred by the issue of definition. Rape in medieval Europe was never an easy crime to classify. Religious law (that is, canon law) said that extramarital sex was wrong; secular law said that violence was wrong.’
Wow. Insightful. Each sentence communicates something. Efficient. You know the meme of Homer Simpson saying ‘that’s a good looking grill – why doesn’t mine look like that???’. Yeah. That.
Why would this be? Did they rush publication so fast that the Editors didn’t get a chance to even out the rough edges? Did different people work on different chapters, where some collaborators really rewrote the base chapter but some just gave some pointers and bounced? Like, was it actually a different person who wrote this?
Strangely, this chapter – the highest quality, by some margin – ends with an intriguing paragraph:
‘Perhaps surprisingly, this is the last time we will look at sexual violence in this book. It was so prevalent and so unremittingly depressing to write about that I have not included it further. For our current purposes, however, it is important to remember that its absence from the text in no way suggests that it was absent from society. On the contrary, the reality – or very real threat – of sexual violence was everywhere.’
He does go on to mention rape and sexual violence again, after this unique instance of breaking the authorial fourth wall, though not with the insightful and sharp voice that this chapter – alone – has. Interestingly, this would also be a way to tacitly acknowledge that a published chapter contains knowledge that the author does not themselves possess and cannot be expected to reappear again. Hmm.
We can’t know, I guess. It certainly is noticeable and distracting, but maybe only if you’re a persnickety audience member. Or a woman, I suppose.
So the first couple of SERIOUS complaints which in my opinion are very defensible are as follows: precising definitions and bioessentialism.
Starting with the first one. Maybe this is a me problem, but if I pick up a book that is called ‘Crusader Criminals’ I would kind of expect the author to define what they mean by crusaders, and what they mean by criminals.
After all, soldiers burning, pillaging, raping, and killing was often entirely legal. Can their behaviour be labelled as criminal? What about monks breaking their vows? Does it even make sense to discuss their actions alongside the petty crimes which everyone knew and accepted were crimes under the law?
As far as Tibble seems to believe, a crime is something that is violent, including robbery, but also legal gambling, because it was dangerous, and also Templars breaking their vows, because I don’t know. I say that based on what he included in the book – including those fully legally and religiously sanctified acts of violence – not based on anything he explicitly says. This is an absurd little hole to leave in the analysis and allows a certain bloat.
Worse, maybe, or at least more irritating, Tibble also doesn’t define what he means by ‘crusaders’.
You’ll find that he generally means men travelling to or ruling in Outremer, though he again doesn’t say that. RIP the northern, Albigensian, and Spanish crusaders – people will take you seriously one day. But though the decision not to explicitly lay out what he’s actually talking about may have been an oversight, it kind of feels purposeful when it comes to refusing to lay out a distinct time period.
Many of the examples Tibble gives are European examples dating to well, WELL after the crusading period. For example, when talking about the dangers of drinking and how it could be linked to violence, he cites a case from 26 August 1379.
13 fucking 79?
That’s like using an example from WWII to explain warfare in the Crimean war. In still another example, Tibble again launders data from completely different periods, claiming that they are contemporary:
‘Crime data is always problematic: we have no quantitative figures for the crusader states, for instance, but contemporary case studies in European societies shed light on the gender patterns underlying violent offences. In mid-thirteenth-century England, less than 10% of the people accused of murder were female. Similarly, in France, the court records for the period 1389-1422 show that women represented only 4% of petitioners seeking a pardon for serious crimes.’
Girl. Mid-thirteenth-century, fine. It’s laaate in the crusading period, a couple of generations removed from the loss of Jerusalem. But why include the data from 1389-1422??? Over a hundred years after the last toehold of Outremer was lost, nearly 100 years after the Templars were disbanded (violently) by the French. No one alive in 1389-1422 was a crusader in the sense of having lived in or ruled over anywhere in Outremer. This is not contemporaneous data and it would be better to have stopped at ‘we have no quantitative figures’.
My sneaking suspicion, having realised there was a bit of a pattern to the sources used, is that Tibble might be able to access/use French sources only. This is just an assumption, but the number of shoehorned examples which were from 13th or 14th century France is notable, as is the use of a limited number of Arabic sources, almost all of which are available in French translation.
There’s nothing wrong with writing history with limited language skills, but I do think there is something wrong with blurring the lines between time periods and culture to present data, examples, and people as though they are relevant when they are not.
My second big gripe is a continuous, aggressive bioessentialism. Tibble seems to genuinely believe that testosterone makes men evil. I started counting how many times he actually used the word ‘testosterone’ but lost count at 9.
Men are overwhelmingly the main perpetrators of crime, especially violent crime. That’s not in question.
What I do question, and find uncomfortable, is ascribing this to the ‘unrestraining’ effects of testosterone rather than, say, a religio-social framework of control that trained women to perform subservience and men to expect dominance, with violence seen as the natural corrective for failing to achieve your gendered role.
There is only one passage in the entire book that realistically assesses the behaviour of men as a social expectation and tied to classist and misogynistic beliefs, rather than, like. In-built into men, somehow. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it appears in the chapter which covers gendered violence against women which I questioned above as to whether it was written by someone else, given the different writing style and quality on show.
Outside of that one chapter, for Tibble:
‘Wilder elite males’ have ‘predatory inclinations’
‘Armed men’ have ‘violent tendencies’
‘The connection between testosterone, alcohol and aggression is clear’
Encouraging or ordering criminals to join crusades sent them to ‘places where they might do something more useful with their testosterone.’
At one point, he even exclaims that ‘the mind boggles’ at the concept of crusading knights reading romantic novels.
Look, I’m as anti-men as the next lesbian and even I think he’s taking this too far.
Painting testosterone as a kind of chemical X that poisons your bloodstream with the capacity to commit evil is itself deeply misogynistic and also trans/homophobic. It creates an almost magical explanation for violence without critiquing the societal structures underpinning it, creating a kind of fatalism about ‘male evil’ that can’t really be justified in a world where queer and trans people also exist. Male violence is a complex social phenomenon, not a biological mechanism.
Pretending that male violence is inevitable is also part of a carceral mindset. If you believe that a man, when given the opportunity, will always be an aggressor, then you will only be able to imagine dealing with him through punishment, control, or even anticipative violence. There is no place for compassion. There is no place for alternative justice systems, or a reduction of state violence in response.
For me personally, there are some examples of violence against others that are unforgiveable – sorry Angela Davis, I respect you so so so much – but painting all male violence as biologically determined is insane.
It is also swiftly becoming a bit of a dog whistle for the far right.
This is where I’m getting to my complaint which might be a bit of a stretch. Stay with me girl. Immigration is the absolute far right darling right now, as a concept. It’s been so easy for them to turn it into a culture war topic of such fierce debate that the Overton window has completely shifted on how migrants and refugees are discussed in public, in parliament, on TV. One of their favourite refrains lately is to comment under images of migrants, say the ones recently involved in a mass migration attempt in Cueta, something to the effect of ‘they’re all young men of fighting age.’
The implication is that some nefarious global plot is afoot to ‘replace’ young men with virile migrants operating as an occupying force who will rape their women and take their jobs, of course.
I wouldn’t normally connect an author making weird bioessentialist comments with a currently very popular right wing talking point about migration, were it not for two little comments that put my teeth on edge.
The first comes early on in the book:
‘Most obviously, there was the increased predisposition of young armed men to take advantage of civilian populations when the opportunity presented itself. (One only has to look at the newspaper headlines of any modern war zone, any narco-controlled area in South America, or any long-running uprising in Africa to see the depressingly consistent nature of that male exploitation.)’
Narco-states and African uprisings… right, right… and you couldn’t think of recent, high-profile cases of any other young armed men taking advantage of civilians? Nothing from the Ukraine war, maybe? Nothing about Israeli genocide? No wild ICE recruitment drives putting untrained, bigoted idiots with guns on the streets and directly leading to high-profile murders in plain daylight? Hmm.
My suspicion was a little piqued. I really am wondering if I was primed to hear dog whistles on the wind, or if he really meant it that way, but the final endpiece of the book made me look around for the nearest trusted adult to confirm that this was, in fact, far right rhetoric:
‘This book… has been the story of how climate change and migration – forces so vast as to be almost invisible to the actors on the ground – can have a profoundly scarring effect on civil society; and of how a monumental gathering of ‘the usual suspects’, irrespective of religion or ethnicity, creates a maelstrom of criminality and pushes local communities to the brink of collapse. These men were not just vastly overrepresented in the population: they also had a negative halo effect on the rest of society. They made poor behaviour the norm, and other social groups inevitably felt empowered to join them… Modern societies face some disturbingly parallel issues of climate change and its knock-on effects. Importantly, we now have the technology and resources to understand these macro drivers with far greater clarity: unlike the crusaders, we have the luxury of knowledge and economic surplus. But that knowledge is rarely translated into strategy or action. We would do well to reflect on the profoundly negative consequences of failing to address these issues with sufficient foresight and sensitivity.’
Am I being crazy? Probably. But go woke or go broke, IMO.
Crusader Criminals is a deeply frustrating book. The subject itself is fascinating and occasionally there’s a fun, distracting little anecdote about a guy called ‘Madman’ being outrageously corrupt and murdering a vizier over some rugs. But the delivery method is sloppy; an ill-defined scope, uneven writing, and an obsession with the malign effects of testosterone all undercut the vision. The result is a book that gestures to methodology, but does not engage.
Unfortunately, some good stories and an interesting hook idea do not a sophisticated history make. I got some enjoyment out of it, but ultimately the central analytical framework is too shaky. Like a fairground ride that comes out of a suitcase, the target audience might be 15 year olds who are here to egg each other on and throw up down the side of the teacups – but I don’t trust it, and you’re not getting my rickety bones strapped in without a fight. There is a good book to be written about crime in the crusading world, but it is not this one and, in my opinion, it is not this writer either.
November 2, 2025
Being a little generous but going to give this a 5/5.
I really liked it, it covers all kinds of crimes and violence from individual cases of murder and robbery to more organised banditry, raiding, and piracy. Despite being called Crusader Criminals there is quite a lot on the Muslim side as well. The book is very well written with lots of examples and stories of murder and pillaging. Some of my favourite chapters cover topics including -
Banditry on such a scale it could hold up entire armies
Crusader piracy that became so big and lucrative that the crusader states didn't need a standing navy they could just cobble a navy together from hiring pirates as needed (piracy here is presented as something that was just dipped into when convenient rather than a specific career choice, you could be ferrying pilgrims or shipping supplies and dabble in a bit of piracy if the opportunity came up)
Bedouin raiders who worked with both Christian and Muslim, whoever was more profitable at the exact moment
Crusader prisoners of war after and their descendants in Cairo who took over the illegal wine trade like some kind of medieval bootleggers after the fall of the Crusader states.
For a book about the Crusades religion doesn't actually show up that much. A lot of the crimes and violence are opportunistic and often done to people of the same religion. At most religion just made it a bit easier to justify killing or robbing someone of a different belief, but the crime would have probably happened anyway.
The authors main explanation for the scale of the violence is mainly that the demographic demands of the crusades acted like a black hole sucking in huge numbers of young heavily armed men from all over Eurasia and Africa (crusading Christians, steppe nomads, slave soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa) who are the group most likely to be violent criminals. The presence of all these violent young men meant the locals also had to arm themselves for their own safety and being armed also gave them the opportunity for crime and robbery. All of this turned the region into a incredibly lawless frontier zone where even leaving your own village was dangerous and travel was really dangerous unless in large groups.
I really liked it, it covers all kinds of crimes and violence from individual cases of murder and robbery to more organised banditry, raiding, and piracy. Despite being called Crusader Criminals there is quite a lot on the Muslim side as well. The book is very well written with lots of examples and stories of murder and pillaging. Some of my favourite chapters cover topics including -
Banditry on such a scale it could hold up entire armies
Crusader piracy that became so big and lucrative that the crusader states didn't need a standing navy they could just cobble a navy together from hiring pirates as needed (piracy here is presented as something that was just dipped into when convenient rather than a specific career choice, you could be ferrying pilgrims or shipping supplies and dabble in a bit of piracy if the opportunity came up)
Bedouin raiders who worked with both Christian and Muslim, whoever was more profitable at the exact moment
Crusader prisoners of war after and their descendants in Cairo who took over the illegal wine trade like some kind of medieval bootleggers after the fall of the Crusader states.
For a book about the Crusades religion doesn't actually show up that much. A lot of the crimes and violence are opportunistic and often done to people of the same religion. At most religion just made it a bit easier to justify killing or robbing someone of a different belief, but the crime would have probably happened anyway.
The authors main explanation for the scale of the violence is mainly that the demographic demands of the crusades acted like a black hole sucking in huge numbers of young heavily armed men from all over Eurasia and Africa (crusading Christians, steppe nomads, slave soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa) who are the group most likely to be violent criminals. The presence of all these violent young men meant the locals also had to arm themselves for their own safety and being armed also gave them the opportunity for crime and robbery. All of this turned the region into a incredibly lawless frontier zone where even leaving your own village was dangerous and travel was really dangerous unless in large groups.
January 31, 2026
A non narrative popular history about violence and criminality during the crusader era primarily focused on the Crusader States, Syria, Egypt, and surrounding areas as well as the areas the Crusaders were coming from. The author shares a wide variety of entertaining anecdotes and stories to convey larger trends and societal norms.
March 22, 2026
Really good, well paced, and very interesting. Highly recommend.
July 23, 2025
This book is a must read for any medeivalist who also loves a good criminal underworld thriller!
If you're a writer, wanting to write a book in the medieval criminal underworld, you need to consult this amazing manuscript!
Gangsters, assassin's, corrupt Templars, criminal overlords ( which the author shows is much more appropriate to medieval gangsters, the modern) and even pirates!
There are so many unique stories of individuals from various cultures and backgrounds theoighout this book! Each twisty tale is enviroatingly interesting!!
My only criticism of the authors work is that for someone who chose to write about such a brash and open wound topic the author seems to have a very strong disdain and dislike for the type of individuals that he is writing about. their actions seem to very much disgust our fearless writer.
This might be the north american in me talking but this author seems to be quite ...liberal (sorry had to say it) in his ideas. I get a strong sense that Tibble would not approve of the first amendment. He seems generally troubled, by the fact, everyone in the middle ages carried a sword and knew how to use it. His overall bias towards weapons and carrying them in general is one of disgust.
The author also contributes criminality to hormonal, environmental and cultural issues. the author makes a distinct observation that having several different cultures and religions, all in one place leads to massive criminal activity. i couldn't help but see parallels to some issues we have going on here in Canada today.
As a lover of crime thriller I generally found these stories and individuals very intriguing. The author sadly shyed away from talking about women to a great extent in this book he stated that was because he could not bring himself the talk about the subject of rape and and sexual violence that accompanies women in this time period. I was disheartened by this because I really would have liked to have had a look at those women's stories and hear their voices even if it was from texts written by men. i feel by not including more from them Tibble did a bit of a disservice.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to the library of any medievalist or lover of criminal underworld novels! i hope someone someday writes a thriller novel using some of these people and historical events.
If you're a writer, wanting to write a book in the medieval criminal underworld, you need to consult this amazing manuscript!
Gangsters, assassin's, corrupt Templars, criminal overlords ( which the author shows is much more appropriate to medieval gangsters, the modern) and even pirates!
There are so many unique stories of individuals from various cultures and backgrounds theoighout this book! Each twisty tale is enviroatingly interesting!!
My only criticism of the authors work is that for someone who chose to write about such a brash and open wound topic the author seems to have a very strong disdain and dislike for the type of individuals that he is writing about. their actions seem to very much disgust our fearless writer.
This might be the north american in me talking but this author seems to be quite ...liberal (sorry had to say it) in his ideas. I get a strong sense that Tibble would not approve of the first amendment. He seems generally troubled, by the fact, everyone in the middle ages carried a sword and knew how to use it. His overall bias towards weapons and carrying them in general is one of disgust.
The author also contributes criminality to hormonal, environmental and cultural issues. the author makes a distinct observation that having several different cultures and religions, all in one place leads to massive criminal activity. i couldn't help but see parallels to some issues we have going on here in Canada today.
As a lover of crime thriller I generally found these stories and individuals very intriguing. The author sadly shyed away from talking about women to a great extent in this book he stated that was because he could not bring himself the talk about the subject of rape and and sexual violence that accompanies women in this time period. I was disheartened by this because I really would have liked to have had a look at those women's stories and hear their voices even if it was from texts written by men. i feel by not including more from them Tibble did a bit of a disservice.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to the library of any medievalist or lover of criminal underworld novels! i hope someone someday writes a thriller novel using some of these people and historical events.
May 18, 2026
Something of a disappointment, but only because the basic concept is so good and so original. I studied the Crusades quite extensively at undergraduate level many years ago, and this book promised a genuinely new perspective. Unfortunately, a lurid tabloid tone and some rather shallow analysis undermine it. It's also hurt by the usual lack of sources for this period; there ultimately isn't all that much the book can say on many subjects beyond speculation, and there are a few eyebrow-raising moments when Prof. Tibble resorts to supporting his points with examples from France in the 13-1400s, an entirely different world from the crusader states. It will also come as no surprise to anyone having studied the era that the writer has to rely on that rakish old schemer Usama ibn Munqidh for all his best stories (bless that cad and his self-aggrandising chronicle for making scholarship of the 1100s so much more entertaining!).
It's interesting to come back to a subject one studied in detail twenty years ago, to see the evolution in analysis and interpretation one missed in the interim. In the secular and cynical 1970s and 80s, it was common for historians to discount the religious motivations of the crusaders as hypocritical cant, merely ideological cover for economically motivated military entrepreneurs. In the 1990s and 2000s, in the shadow of Waco and 9/11, it became more common for writers to take the religious motivations of the crusaders seriously. Now, in an era when climate change and mass migration dominate politics, I find a book about the crusades proposing climate change and mass migration as the main drivers of that era of violence and dislocation. Historians will always analyse their subject matter based on their own lived experience, and look for interpretations relevant to their own situation, and there isn't anything wrong with that - but it's strange to see that progression so starkly illuminated.
It's interesting to come back to a subject one studied in detail twenty years ago, to see the evolution in analysis and interpretation one missed in the interim. In the secular and cynical 1970s and 80s, it was common for historians to discount the religious motivations of the crusaders as hypocritical cant, merely ideological cover for economically motivated military entrepreneurs. In the 1990s and 2000s, in the shadow of Waco and 9/11, it became more common for writers to take the religious motivations of the crusaders seriously. Now, in an era when climate change and mass migration dominate politics, I find a book about the crusades proposing climate change and mass migration as the main drivers of that era of violence and dislocation. Historians will always analyse their subject matter based on their own lived experience, and look for interpretations relevant to their own situation, and there isn't anything wrong with that - but it's strange to see that progression so starkly illuminated.
October 15, 2024
Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land by Steve Tibble offers a unique perspective on the Crusades, focusing on the knights who abandoned their noble missions to engage in criminal activities. This historical account sheds light on the lesser-known stories of Crusader knights who turned rogue, driven by greed, power, or personal ambition. Tibble delves into the complex social and political dynamics of the medieval period, where some knights, rather than upholding the ideals of chivalry, became bandits, mercenaries, and rebels in the Holy Land.
The book presents an intriguing contrast between the widely accepted image of Crusader knights as defenders of Christendom and those who chose the path of lawlessness. By exploring these renegade figures, Tibble offers a fresh angle on medieval history, providing readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding the Crusades. For anyone interested in medieval history, military campaigns, or the darker aspects of human nature during times of conflict, this book is a compelling and insightful read.
The book presents an intriguing contrast between the widely accepted image of Crusader knights as defenders of Christendom and those who chose the path of lawlessness. By exploring these renegade figures, Tibble offers a fresh angle on medieval history, providing readers with a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding the Crusades. For anyone interested in medieval history, military campaigns, or the darker aspects of human nature during times of conflict, this book is a compelling and insightful read.
December 15, 2025
Tibble examines criminal cases involving both famous and lesser-known figures of the Crusades, covering Western Franks as well as Muslims. He draws on chronicles such as John of Joinville, al-Qalanisi, Usama ibn Munqidh and Ibn al-Athir, using them to discuss specific crimes, criminal/violent events and how contemporaries wrote about them. There is some reference to legal cases in France, though this is not a major focus, and probably done due to a lack of sources in the Levant on particular case types.
He discusses female violence and organizes crimes thematically—murder, gambling, Bedouins, and piracy, white collar crime etc. The book is geographically limited to the Levant, Egypt and Anatolia, with no coverage of Iberia, southern France, or the Baltics; which is fine but just so you know. Overall, the book is well written and engaging rather than dry, Tibble is openly cynical about most people in the book in general, criticizing both Latin knights and Muslim lords without hesitation; but still fair.
He discusses female violence and organizes crimes thematically—murder, gambling, Bedouins, and piracy, white collar crime etc. The book is geographically limited to the Levant, Egypt and Anatolia, with no coverage of Iberia, southern France, or the Baltics; which is fine but just so you know. Overall, the book is well written and engaging rather than dry, Tibble is openly cynical about most people in the book in general, criticizing both Latin knights and Muslim lords without hesitation; but still fair.
May 10, 2026
Ohhh, I wanted to like this one. I have no idea how the author managed to make murder and mayhem sound so dry. This is obviously a brilliantly researched book, but on a spectrum from lurid entertainment to academic tract, it's decidedly toward the college term paper end of the spectrum. I enjoyed it well enough because I'm an Outremer nerd and found the subject matter fascinating for its own sake, but I wouldn't call it an enjoyable read.
November 9, 2025
Pretty good, although it took me longer than usual to read due to my circumstances.
I would definitely appreciate more examples from the Crusader states and the other side, if there are any more to be had - even what was provided was interesting though.
I would definitely appreciate more examples from the Crusader states and the other side, if there are any more to be had - even what was provided was interesting though.
January 1, 2025
Interesting facts on this timeline of History.
September 29, 2025
This is an insightful and well-structured book about knights not living up to their glorified ideals, changing my perspective on life beyond the Crusader battlefields.
January 1, 2026
We knew the crusaders were no pacifists but what mr. Tibble shows us is a far worse picture than I ever imagined. The problem I had was the sheer amount of anecdote...
January 22, 2026
Interesting read. New perspective on the crusades. Enjoyed reading.
March 24, 2026
Excellent book: well written & illuminating
March 26, 2026
very well written and entertaing account of criminality in the crusades
September 22, 2026
Was reading this on and off for the last several months. Definitely interesting, but paints a bleak picture of the eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades.
March 14, 2025
an interesting and informative account of crime during the crusades
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