Loyalty has a curious standing in a time like ours. We’ve been trained to see it as a one-way street: something to be given by soldiers to commanders, by employees to executives, by the powerless to the powerful. As for the loyalties owed by the mighty to those beneath them … those don’t seem to get mentioned very often. At the same time, we hear so many stories of abuses committed by authorities (especially ones before the advent of Our Democracy) that loyalty starts to seem like a very devious mechanism of control, designed by the powerful for the the sake of power. This supposed virtue seems to get simple men manipulated. So what’s it actually good for?
We should indeed be skeptical of one-way loyalty. It’s a raw deal. The truth is that real loyalty goes both ways: George Patton once said that any great man who wishes to remain great needs to show loyalty to the men serving under him, rather than simply demanding it from them. He needs to give them good reason to continue on his side.
Last week I posted an example of a great king’s devotion to his men, when Richard the Lionheart rode to the rescue of captured Crusaders. Another episode from the history of the Crusades makes an even more poignant case for top-down loyalty.
St Louis IX
The Seventh Crusade began beautifully and ended disastrously. St Louis, borrowing the strategy that Richard determined was necessary for taking and holding the Holy Lands, decided to start with Egypt before moving toward Jerusalem. Damietta fell almost immediately; the siege of took one day to complete rather than the several months that Louis had anticipated and allotted. But this worked against him. He had drawn up intricate plans—taking into account the seasons in Egypt, the river, the difficulties of keeping an army occupied—and now those plans were already useless.
(It’s an inversion of Mike Tyson’s line that “Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth.” In this case, Louis did the punching and then had to make sense of things he hadn’t anticipated.)
He decided to press forward with the campaign, and it all fell apart from there. “By what judgment of God I know not, everything turned out contrary to our desires,” Louis wrote. Among the disasters was a plague in Louis’ forward camp which killed or incapacitated five out of every six Crusaders. Soon the Egyptians captured the rest, including the king (but not including those holding Damietta or back with the ships). The most well-funded and carefully planned Crusade—the Crusade to end all Crusades—became the biggest victory yet won by the Muslims.
After months in prison, Louis arranged a deal with his captors: he would pay 800,000 bezants, relinquish Damietta, and release the captives he himself had taken, while the sultan would free Louis and his men. It got a little complicated after that—because the Mamluks revolted against their sultan—but the French eventually agreed to the same terms with their new captors. Unfortunately for Louis, the Mamluks didn’t take their promise all that seriously. They accepted Louis’ money, reclaimed Damietta, and then released the king and only 400 others, keeping the rest of the 12,000 in prison. For such men, honor was achieved not in keeping their word to the infidel, but in anything that weakened him.
The Seventh Crusade was over. “All Christendom,” Louis wrote, “has been brought to confusion because of me.” Everyone agreed it was time to go home—everyone except Louis and a small band of soldiers who would stay with him. For the king it was unthinkable to go back to France while 12,000 of his men languished in Egyptian prisons, especially not when pressure would be brought against the prisoners to apostatize, with swords to their throats. He would sail to the Crusader kingdoms and figure out what could be done.
Taking the Holy Lands was out of the question. But Louis could liberate individual Christians. His search parties went out to find and purchase the freedom of Christian captives or slaves throughout the region. (There were a lot. Historian Hugh Kennedy noted that “Islamic jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade.”) Louis and his parties would return with hundreds at a time. With his own funds Louis also helped fortify the kingdoms of Acre, Jaffa, Haifa, Caesarea, and Sidon—rebuilding not just the fortifications, but churches as well.
Then his opportunity came. When the instability in Egypt led to hostilities with their neighbors, the Egyptians turned to Louis, of all people, for help! In exchange for his military assistance, they would finally honor the bargain and release Louis’ 12,000 men. In the end, he didn’t have to do much to help the Egyptians, since they made peace with their rivals quickly (and regretted returning so many captives). What matters is that he got his men back.
It was only then, after six years away, after a strange and heartbreaking Crusade, that Louis sailed for home.
In the 1990s in Carlsbad California not far from where I lived a meeting of executives occurred. There was a famous Hewlett Packard executive who was the guest of honor. The question that was most common in the floor was “How do we get the loyalty of employees back?”
He said “you can’t.”
You’ve cut benefits and engaged the temporary services to avoid paying benefits altogether. Now you’re preparing to transfer jobs overseas.
Most importantly the newest working generation has only experienced a market where the only way to make more money, is to constantly change jobs. It is the only market they have ever known.
We continue to read the Commentarii de bello gallico, seeing just why the soldiers of Gaius Julius were devoted to him.