For the crusaders, it wasn’t wearing armor that caused major heat exhaustion but rather dehydration. After all, even the Muslim forces wore armor, so that myth is out the window. Dehydration was a huge problem in the field though. That’s why I wonder how differently crusaders would’ve faired in the hot climate if they had adopted the fermented camel’s milk that nomadic desert tribes like the Bedouins and Tuareg used for survival. Let’s get into it…

Because milk spoils quickly, fermenting it was so vital for the Bedouins’ lifestyle that they called it “white gold.” Even the Mongols drank fermented mare’s milk.

The process of making fermented camel’s milk is simple, too. You just hang the milk in a leather jug from the side of your camel for 72 hours. It becomes sour and acidic with up to 3% alcohol, and a foamy cream is skimmed off the top to be eaten separately. This practice goes back to at least 3000 BC, and if adopted by crusaders they could’ve had more hydration, more energy, and could’ve adapted more easily to the desert, greatly impacting their logistics.

Upon sharing this idea, people brought up 3 amazing points on why it’s unlikely the crusaders would’ve adopted fermented camel’s milk to help with their hydration issues in the field:

• European stomachs need time to adapt to the drink or else diarrhea is an extreme risk
• The crusaders did not have lactating dairy camels to begin with
• Getting dairy camels from nomadic tribes like the Bedouins would’ve been hard because they were Muslims and wouldn’t want to help a Christian invasion force

For the sake of an alternative history exercise, however, I still believe the crusaders could’ve (1) slowly acclimated their stomachs to the drink by ingesting it in small doses over time, (2) trained their men on how to breed camels for lactation, (3) plundered dairy camels as prizes of war to get started.

If crusaders had accustomed themselves to fermented camel’s milk (which has a shelf life of up to 10 days!) and used this knowledge to their advantage for future crusading efforts, history might’ve looked incredibly different.

By keeping herds of dairy camels for a constant supply of energy and hydration, battles that were lost majorly due to dehydration could’ve been won by the crusaders, like the battle of Hattin and many others.

The improvement in logistics could’ve compounded to eventually lead to Jerusalem never falling out of Christian hands, which then could’ve led to there never being an Ottoman conquest of eastern Europe, and the Age of Discovery would’ve been completely reshaped, all because of one drink the Bedouins call “white gold of the desert”.

Isn’t that something! Do you agree this could’ve been a possibility? Let me know in the comments.