Idea: Surving Kingdom of Jersualem

Brightflame

Banned
In the last week I've started a timeline that examines the implications of a surviving Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, with a tiny PoD on the First Crusade and a much larger one at the Battle of Azaz. The Kingdom becomes luckier than Alexander the Great and America combined, and manages to expand around the globe in the thirst for money, power and salvation. The KoJ becomes an Apartheid state that holds 40% of the worlds oil. I just have a few questions:

1. I have the Crusaders institute an equivalent to the Jizya tax. Would this discourage conversion efforts on the part of the Crusaders?

2. At what point is a conception of race going to develop? I already have some good ideas for petty segregation, but when does it become a scientific/religious concept?

3. How could a 13th century army of knights, longbowmen, pikes, and horse archers defeat the Mongols. They are obviously going to be pushed around massively, but can they prevent the loss of Jerusalem and coastal enclaves?
 
1. Medieval Christianity has nowhere near the tolerance level of Islam (primarily because Islam made a practical distinction between 'People of the Book' and 'heathens') so the idea of Jizya is near incomprehensible imho. But even with that, KoJ will have immense difficulty implementing it because Muslims would just move to Damascus and Egypt in response.

2. A concept of race will probably not develop in the KoJ. You'd probably have a large population of mixed within a couple of generations. If an idea of race and 'otherness' is going to develop it will come from 1st-gen crusaders coming in from Europe.

3. A smart KoJ will not fight the Mongols, since they will have common enemies in the Muslim nations. Best to come to some sort of vassalage arrangement, the Pope's pronouncements be damned.

If you have to fight, take advantage of horse archers' relative uselessness in siege combat. Mutually reinforcing fortresses, drawing the Mongols in and then surrounding/destroying them. The crusaders will have to develop light cavalry/infantry of some sort for it to work, not that difficult if you start having 2nd-gen crusaders taking charge of the kingdom (and thus are less tied to European ways of fighting).
 
If you have to fight, take advantage of horse archers' relative uselessness in siege combat. Mutually reinforcing fortresses, drawing the Mongols in and then surrounding/destroying them. The crusaders will have to develop light cavalry/infantry of some sort for it to work, not that difficult if you start having 2nd-gen crusaders taking charge of the kingdom (and thus are less tied to European ways of fighting).

Didn't the Mongols use siege weapons in their conquests, though (taken from China)? Not to mention how they threw dead animals and people over castle walls to spread disease.
 
1. Medieval Christianity has nowhere near the tolerance level of Islam (primarily because Islam made a practical distinction between 'People of the Book' and 'heathens') so the idea of Jizya is near incomprehensible imho. But even with that, KoJ will have immense difficulty implementing it because Muslims would just move to Damascus and Egypt in response.

That's not quite true. The Normans and the Aragonese developed a reverse jizya to collect taxes from their Muslim populations. I don't see why a King of Jerusalem, perhaps one with not as much zeal to expel the Muslims as his predecessors and married to a Sicilian or Aragonese, would consider the idea of using the Kingdom's Muslim population to gather revenue (as well as an indirect means of providing incentives for conversion).
 
Didn't the Mongols use siege weapons in their conquests, though (taken from China)? Not to mention how they threw dead animals and people over castle walls to spread disease.

Yeah they did, but I'm guessing that being a horse-archer army, the Mongols would want to avoid siege if they could help it (especially siege of Crusader castles, which possessed little wealth compared with cities), and it really is the only place where the crusaders wouldn't lose to them. And the stuff that the Crusaders built (Krak des Chevaliers) is of a totally different level to Chinese and Muslim fortifications.

Re:Cuautemoc - I did not know that! Wow! Who knew... but still, I don't know if it would have worked as well in Palestine. It's just so close to other centers that the cost of moving is quite small...
 
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Brightflame

Banned
Thank you for all the replies. Just one more question. I haven't been able to find any evidence of missionary activities on the part of the Crusaders. Were there any attempts to convert the Eastern Christians and Muslims on the part of the Latins, and if so, how effective were they?
 
Thank you for all the replies. Just one more question. I haven't been able to find any evidence of missionary activities on the part of the Crusaders. Were there any attempts to convert the Eastern Christians and Muslims on the part of the Latins, and if so, how effective were they?

Simply judging by the practices of other Christian nations and rulers at the time, I'd imagine the Crusaders would go for a simple 'convert or die' policy, with little attempts at peaceful conversion.
 

Brightflame

Banned
Simply judging by the practices of other Christian nations and rulers at the time, I'd imagine the Crusaders would go for a simple 'convert or die' policy, with little attempts at peaceful conversion.

Perhaps the newer Crusaders straight from Europe took that approach, but apart from the ban on Muslim entry to Jerusalem (and the 1099 massacre) there was hardly any major violence against Muslims.
 
Perhaps the newer Crusaders straight from Europe took that approach, but apart from the ban on Muslim entry to Jerusalem (and the 1099 massacre) there was hardly any major violence against Muslims.

Huh. To be honest, I was just going off of the conflicts going on in Europe in the Middle Ages between Christians and pagans.
 
Perhaps the newer Crusaders straight from Europe took that approach, but apart from the ban on Muslim entry to Jerusalem (and the 1099 massacre) there was hardly any major violence against Muslims.

It seems that there was little missionary work either, at least as encouraged by the Kingdom itself.
 

katchen

Banned
If it lasts that long, the Kingdom of Jerusalem not only needs to become the vassals of the Mongols, it needs to fight with the Mongols (since Kitabolga has dangerously few of them) to defeat Baibars and the Mamelukes and then go along with the Mongol policy of tolerance when it comes to the otherwise heretic Coptic Christians of Egypt, even to the point of attracting as many Christians from Egypt and Nestorian Christians from Asia to Jerusalem and the Levant as possible. The Kingdom needs as many Christians of any stripe as possible, whatever the Pope's position on the matter, and if push comes to shove, the Il Khans will be returning after the Kuriltai.
Then work very hard at getting the IlKhan to convert to Catholicism rather than Islam.
 
3. How could a 13th century army of knights, longbowmen, pikes, and horse archers defeat the Mongols. They are obviously going to be pushed around massively, but can they prevent the loss of Jerusalem and coastal enclaves?

IOTL the Crusaders would fight Turkish horse archers using mixed spear/crossbow formations, so I'd imagine they'd employ something similar against the Mongols.
 
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