It is somewhat odd, given the amount of attention that has been paid to the military history of the Crusades, and the degree to which one is currently wary of using the words “decisive” and “battle” in the same sentence without seeming hopelessly antiquated, that the battle outside of Adrianople in 1205 does not seem to have attracted much attention. After all, most of the other “decisive battles” of the Crusades have certainly received ample consideration. One would think that it would receive more attention, given that it is also one of our relatively few clear battle descriptions of the Cumans, a people who were as important in the thirteenth century as they are almost completely unknown today. And perhaps that, in conjunction with the brutal clarity of Geoffroi de Villehardouin’s chronicle, helps to explain why the topic doesn't seem to generate a lot of discussion.

That is a pity, because while the Cumans themselves seem to be of fairly marginal interest except to Russian and Hungarian scholars, the events outside of Adrianople have quite a bit to teach us. To begin with, by the time of the Fourth Crusade, one cannot posit that the Crusaders had no experience fighting light cavalry and horse archers pursuing nomadic tactics. At the same time, however, as much as one has to draw parallels, the phrase “nomadic tactics” itself is a definition that is almost meaninglessly abstract, and if one uses it as an explanatory bucket into which to simply pour all of the horsemen of the Eurasian steppe, we miss an opportunity to explain what happened at one of the few medieval battles where one can seriously suggest that the future of Europe would have looked very different had it had a different outcome.

First and foremost, we can summarize the main points of the Crusader-Cuman encounter as follows, using Villehardouin's account:

1 The day before the main battle, the Cumans trick the Crusaders into chasing them, and wound many of their horses with arrows when the Crusaders disengage.