Nicky as an archer, rather than a swordsman? I saw someone suggest this due to the expense of being an actual knight not necessarily aligning with him having been a priest (plus the whole first crusade not having Templars etc) - and apparently the Genoese were known for their archers?
Ahaha, oh dear. Fair warning, you are going to make me roll out my grouchy “I realize it’s graphic novel canon but It’s Just Not Realistic for Nicky to actually fight in the First Crusade if he’s a priest” medieval historian Complaints again, but alas?
I talked in this ask about the medieval relationship between clerics, violence, and weapons, and how they were forbidden from dealing with/bearing swords or even any kind of weapon at all, at least in very strong theory. This would be the same with crossbowmen, which is indeed what the Genoese were known for (in this ask, I discussed Nicky having/using a crossbow as part of his weaponry if he was a regular Genoese soldier, especially since we see him using a long rifle in the present, and crossbows were the assault rifles of their day). While yes, Nicky could technically have gone on crusade as a priest and broken the rules in order to handle weapons, there’s almost no chance he could have gotten up to combat speed with them in two-ish years, especially since so much of the First Crusade involved politics, sieges, laboriously painful travels, and infighting as much or more than any actual fighting. (We’re assuming he left with the main Genoese contingent in 1097, but he could have also arrived in 1099 with the Genoese reinforcements, hence seen almost no fighting before the battle/siege/sack of Jerusalem.) There were the sieges of Nicaea, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and the battle of Dorylaeum, as well as skirmishes and clashes along the way, but a pervasive and major problem on the First Crusade (and then later on the Second Crusade as well) was the involvement of untrained commoners who simply did not know how to fight.
This was why Pope Urban seems to have envisioned the crusade as a professional military undertaking for trained soldiers, rather than a popular religious expedition which many laypeople joined up and then caused major logistical difficulties for the army as a result. The People’s Crusade of 1096 ended in disaster at the Battle of Civetot for this very reason; it’s simply not possible to pick up a sword or a crossbow or anything else and be an effective fighter with it on the spot (especially if you’re facing trained soldiers on the other side, you will get ANNIHILATED). Boys had to train from the age of seven to master weapons, arms, armour (and later, as it developed, the code of chivalry). If you’re interested in reading more about this:
Graham A. Loud, ‘Some Reflections on the Failure of the Second Crusade’, Crusades 4 (2005), 1–15. (This article discusses the Second Crusade’s failure overall, including the fact that Bernard of Clairvaux’s populist preaching caused a number of untrained commoners to take the cross and that there was no improved notion of how the army would have expected to use them.)
Conor Kostick, ‘God’s Bounty, Pauperes and the Crusades of 1096 and 1147’, Studies in Church History 46 (2010), 66–77. (This explores the phenomenon of ‘populist crusading’ among laypeople in the early crusades and how, yes, it went very badly wrong both times.)
Marcus Bull, ‘The Roots of Lay Enthusiasm for the First Crusade,’ History 78 (1993), 353-72. (This discusses how the crusading message was spread beyond Urban’s initial call for military recruits and how that was taken up among medieval society.)
Albert of Aachen, in the Historia Ierosolimitana, was scathing about the efforts of the everyday/untrained crusaders; he called them “a stupid and insanely irresponsible mob of pilgrims” (congregatione pedestris populi stulti et vesane levitates) and this view was shared to some degree among the other First Crusade chroniclers as well, especially in their treatments of Peter the Hermit (the populist leader of the People’s Crusade; they admired his personal religiosity but weren’t all that sure of the actual value of his overall efforts). Obviously yes, some of it is elitism and wanting to make their noble patrons look better and come out as the “real” crusaders, but there’s no reason not to think that the soldiers on the crusade regarded their untrained counterparts as an active liability, because... this would generally be the case if you’re trying to fight and the guy next to you wants to come along and wave a sword he does not know how to use. So while yes, many priests and monks did travel on the crusade in defiance of ecclesiastical orders, if Nicky wanted to even live long enough to get to Jerusalem and meet Yusuf and get killed there for only the first time, he either already knew how to fight (and thus wasn’t a priest) or had been trained for a while before he became a priest (and that’s confusing on its own, but let’s just say that this is me being pedantic and leave it at that).
ANYWAY. Long story short: yes, Nicky could definitely be (and probably was) a crossbowman, since it fits both with the well-attested presence of Genoese crossbowmen in the crusades and the fact that we see him with an assault/sniper rifle later. However, since he also has a broadsword (which is very explicitly a knight’s weapon), the fact of him using both or either of these weapons in active combat on the crusade still doesn’t fit with the supposed graphic novel backstory of him being a priest. He also couldn’t have (or at least is quite unlikely) learned on the journey, because as noted, it doesn’t work like that and would have been against the rules for clerics anyway. So if Nicky was a fighting priest, he was clearly less observant of the spiritual aspects of the role/the church’s strict proscriptions on violence for clerics, and would be more similar to the secular bishops who served in the church as a career. But then it makes less sense to paint him as exceptionally devoted to any of the religious premises of the crusades. Of course, you can break the rules in the name of doing the Right Thing, but eh... it just still doesn’t make sense without a lot of caveats and explanations and headcanoning and work-arounds, and it’s easier just to see him as a regular Genoese soldier at least for the purposes of film-verse backstory. So yes.
