THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN medieval writers, whether interpersonal or intertextual, can reveal fascinating aspects of their respective works. This includes not only the transmission of information over time and through the manuscript tradition but also in terms of the geographical and intellectual reception of their ideas. Medieval writers encountered each other in a number of ways. Some went to school together, others attended public lectures, still more met through chance encounters during court visits and official and personal travels to ecclesiastical centers, or perhaps even on pilgrimages. After making such an acquaintance, a writer might later seek out his work, either in person or through post; an example is John of Salisbury, who once sent Peter of Celle a preliminary draft of his treatise Policraticus and received from the same the letters of Bernard of Clairvaux.

Others met during war time. This chapter is about three writers who participated in the Third Crusade and were all witness sources to the end stages of its first and grandest encounter, the siege of Acre, 1189–91. That all three were at the siege has long been known, and that information was shared between their respective accounts equally so. What has not been studied, however, are the potential interpersonal relationships between them. Since they all traveled east with King Richard the Lionheart's English contingent, there is every possibility that they actually met each other while on campaign. Going further, these three sources for the crusade resemble not the ubiquitous depiction of medieval military historiography – ignorant, cloistered monks composing in obscurity – but rather embedded reporters of more recent times. Proceeding somewhat tongue-in-cheek with this journalism simile, I argue that tracing the physical locations of Ambroise, Richard de Templo, and Roger of Howden during the Third Crusade raises important questions about how information on medieval warfare was recorded and transmitted and that their embedded status enhances the credibility of their accounts of military operations at Acre.

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Richard the Lionheart's contingent began its trek towards the East in the summer of 1189, and we can track the locations of all three authors therein, to varying degrees. As will be shown, the most critical piece is that all of them eventually linked up with the king before he sailed from Marseille to Sicily. We know the exact route of the king himself.

In 2010, Beatrice Heuser published a book entitled Thinking War: The Evolution of Strategy from Antiquity to the Present. In his review in the Journal of Military History, Andrew Lambert called the book “sophisticated and wise” – “epic,” even. But Heuser has little to say about the Middle Ages, covering the entire period in just four pages. She argues that there was “little medieval literature of relevance” to her book because, “how to wage war…was…for a thousand years largely confined to the work of Vegetius.” Apparently, after De re militari, the next “text on warfare that is no longer either a historical treatise or a legal one, nor a copy of Vegetius,” is Bouvet's 1385 Tree of Battles. She then asks the begged question: “Why was there relatively little writing on the way to wage war in the Middle Ages?” The answer she considers “perhaps the most conclusive” is that, because God determined the outcome of war, there was little use speculating how to influence it. She is thus compelled to conclude that there was little intellectual basis for strategy in the Middle Ages.

Heuser's understanding of medieval religion is quaint, but her book and others like it uniformly stand on the purported absence of extant medieval strategic texts in the West (be they called manuals, treatises, or textbooks). Those manuals that did exist were textbooks of ancient works like Vegetius's De re militari. In 1921, Frederick Taylor argued that “the Middle Ages had accepted such books as authoritative and had failed to improve upon them.” His opinion has stuck: in his very recent book, Strategy:A History, Lawrence Freedman claims, “the vital lessons [on warfare] were all still believed to be contained in classical texts.” Likewise, Azar Gat's 2002 History of Military Thought posits that “[m]ilitary theory was then simply the synthesis of the best military models of the cultural past, whether in Greece or Rome”; this is evidently because “very little had changed from the classical era to Machiavelli's time.”5 It is of little wonder that B. H. Liddell Hart could summarize the issue by mocking “the drab stupidity of [the Middle Ages’] military course.” Liddell Hart saw the Middle Ages as a rather inconsequential interlude in the history of strategy and seemed to lament being forced to acknowledge them at all.

There is good reason to include Thomas Becket in discussions of later twelfthcentury military history. The implication of Henry II in the murder of Archbishop Becket in 1170 forced the king to enter into protracted negotiations with the papacy of Alexander III, which seemed inclined towards placing England under censure and perhaps even excommunicating the monarch himself. Two distinct yet related events resulted from this lengthy dispute with the Church, both having military implications. The first was Henry's submission to the will of Alexander in 1172, as the dialogue between papal legates and the king's representatives ended with the signing of the Compromise of Avranches. In his acquiescence, Henry agreed to provide money and manpower for the preservation of the Holy Land. The military impact of Henry's contributions to such crusading efforts is questionable, as is the effect his central funding mechanism, the Saladin Tithe, had upon the English economy. More concrete was the second repercussion of Becket's murder, the rebellions of 1173 and 1174. Various enemies, including the king's own sons and his more traditional opponents Philip of Flanders and Louis VII of France, strengthened by Henry's political weakness, took up arms against the humbled monarch. Avranches and the rebellions were both posthumous retaliations on Becket's part, in a poetic sense, yet there is more to the military side of the Becket story than just the aftermath of his murder.

In the years before Becket became archbishop he was involved in a number of military matters during his days as royal chancellor (1155–1162). On occasion, he even took the field armed for combat and was, if the contemporary accounts are to be believed, wildly successful in his pursuits, by seizing fortified towns and castles, leading cavalry in and out of battle, and engaging in valorous individual combat. The legacy of Thomas the Warrior is, perhaps, not as well remembered as the story of his martyrdom, but his personal involvement in warfare deserves study beyond a casual reading of his activities in the contemporary records. If, as W.L. Warren has argued, Becket's experiences on the battlefield in large part dictated his behavior as archbishop, this military aspect of his life becomes crucial to our understanding of the Becket Affair.