The Crusades dominated both the Christian and Muslim worlds during the Middle Ages. Thousands of experienced knights and ambitious hopefuls- seeking more their fortune than redemption- embarked across Europe towards Jerusalem to regain the Holy City for the Cross. But the warriors and soldiers were accompanied by an entourage of families, servants, clergy and tradesmen and -women, swelling the numbers to thousands.
Looking beyond the cross emblazoned banners, trumpeted fanfare, billowing banting and prancing horses that heralded the start of the Crusade, such a perilous long journey crossing Europe from West to East, encountering the mountain ranges of the near East, deserts and even the seas, was fraught with danger. Besides injuries, pregnancies and common ailments such as scorpion stings, the Crusading trek was beseeched by famine, plagues, leprosy, dehydration, diarrhoea, dysentery and when the fighting commenced – festering battle wounds, severed limbs, gangrene and amputations. Armed with herbaria, crude surgical instruments, their leech books under the arm, and a prayer for a miracle in the heart, the mediciners or leech-crafters stepped up, packed their tumbrels and set off.
Their journey was not just the physical crossing of Europe into the near East, but also a scientific expedition, for in the East they encountered a far more sophisticated Islamic knowledge of healing and medicine. Through cultural cross-pollination medicines, methods, diagnoses, healing and surgery were advanced, metaphorically scaling both sides of the Walls of Jerusalem.
Author Jon G Hughes discusses medieval medicine before and during the Crusades, available leech-books (ancient Gray’s Anatomy) the pharmacopeia, herbaria and medicinal matter a leech-crafter would stock in his tumbrel, the Hospitallers and Knights of the Order of St John and advances of medicine in the Islamic world.
