The Greenhill publication of Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era which was featured in the March issue of Greenhill Military Book News attracted attention, and requests for information about the background to Dr David Nicolle, whose name is well known from his publication of many books on medieval warfare, the Middle East and for Osprey. In response to these requests Dr Nicolle writes: "There was a certain inevitability about the writing of Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era. I don't merely mean that I had to clean my father's collection of armour and swords to earn my pocket money as a child, nor the fact that my father was a founder member of the Arms and Armour Society. Sons tend to rebel against such things, and during my twenties my interest focused on aviation and travel around the Middle East. But pro-Arab sympathies with a persistent fascination for medieval history meant some focus on the crusades was likely to develop. Then came a need to write a substantial university project while training to be a history teacher – a career I never actually took up. What about a project on the arms and armour of those Saracen armies which defied and ultimately defeated the Crusaders? Nobody seemed to have done much on this subject since Mayer's 1943 book on Saracenic arms and armour. My teacher training college didn't think much of the result but the late Dr. Ada Bruh de Hoffmeyer, director of the Instituto de Estudios Sobre Armas Antiguas in Spain, felt that it was worth publishing as a special monograph of the journal Gladius which she edited. The monograph duly published, I suddenly found that I was being footnoted as a leading expert on medieval Islamic arms and armour! Even more to my amazement I found, a few years later, that I was accepted to study for a Doctorate at Edinburgh University. A more serious study of medieval Islamic arms and armour seemed to be the obvious topic for a thesis. So that is what I did. That might have been the end of the affair, particularly as I next found myself teaching art history in a small Jordanian university virtually within shouting distance of the Syrian, Israeli and Israeli-occupied Golan Heights frontiers. Here most of my colleagues concentrated on teaching students in English, despite the fact that the majority of those students barely understood the language. Otherwise, they seemed to spend their time having picnics in that astonishingly beautiful part of the world, or spotting the Israeli reconnaissance aircraft which roared overhead almost daily, despite the fact that everyone from the American president, through the UN secretary general and Israeli prime minister to King Hussein himself, insisted that the planes never actually crossed the frontier. Perhaps they must have got lost rather regularly. I'm reasonably sure the Syrian MiG-21 which roared over the university campus at about two hundred metres one day didn't really mean to be there either. Meanwhile a few of my colleagues at Yarmouk University were using their time in Jordan to do serious research. It ranged from straightforward archaeology, through the thousands of fossilized snails found deep in the Jordanian desert, to reconstructing the precise techniques used by Nabatean potters during the time of Christ. Clearly I should do something as well. I was, in fact, in the fortunate position of not only having my own car but of 'commuting' back and forth between England and Jordan each summer. This meant that I could do research looking at carvings, ceramics, mosaics and so on in both museums and historical sites across much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. I got in touch with Kraus Thomson, the academic publishers based in New York. They were keen, but suggested that a book which also dealt with European arms and armour might be more marketable. Ever optimistic, I said that I would write such a thing. So I did. Only a small edition was published, but it sold out, notwithstanding what I regarded as a ludicrously high price. A couple of years ago, Lionel Leventhal (whom I had known since he and his Arms and Armour Press had their office in Hampstead), suggested that a reprint might be possible. I had been talking about writing something for him for at least twenty years. Well, the final result is not a reprint. Like Topsy it just 'growed' and what we have ended up with is an expanded, considerably revised, totally reformatted and hopefuly improved version of Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era. The first version was written on a creaky old Amstrad, the drawings being enlarged or reduced virtually by hand, and the work mostly being done with a distant view of Mount Hermon, with open windows and a persistent hot dust-laden gale blowing through the appartment. (There was no air conditioning in the staff accommodation of a cash-strapped Yarmouk Univertsity.) The second version was written on a wonderful Macintosh Performa with a view of an ever-changing English garden, in a village where even the local primary school has photocopying facilities to enlarge or reduce drawings to whatever is needed. The first version was dedicated to those Yarmouk University students, mostly Palestinian, who were shot dead by Jordanian riot police for daring to demonstrate against their government. Though the second is dedicated to my ever-patient wife, I couldn't think of any more passionate cause which had a direct bearing on my own daily life. Dog poo on the pavements or the question of whether Lady Martin will be voted on to the parish council hardly seems to be in the same league as gunfire and tear-gas on the campus. But then, as some of my English-speaking Palestinian students said, 'you English don't know you're born'." David Nicolle's second volume of Arms & Armour of the Crusading Era, with the subtitle Islam, Eastern Europe and Asia will be published later this year. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 91 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com