If there is one thing fiction is far better at than history, it’s the freedom to reduce complex political situations down to what really matters. Let me explain: I’m working on a scene set in Acre in the summer of 1290 AD — just months before the city’s fall to the Mamluks would end the Crusader presence in the Holy Land. The lead character in this scene is Nicholas de Hanapes, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Bishop of Acre, and Papal Legate; he needs to explain Acre’s political situation to us, the reader, in the guise of a a French cardinal sent by the Pope to tour the preparations for the coming crusade. Seems simple enough.
Except, the political situation in Acre in the summer of 1290 was an absolute shit-show. Other political shit-shows in history give this particular cluster-fuck the side eye.
At the top of this scrum, you had the King of Jerusalem, Henry II, who ruled his sliver of Outremer from the relative safety of Cyprus. He could not be bothered to show up, and so instead sent his 19-year old brother, Amalric, to command in his stead — which was precisely like trying to force a wolf-pack to take their marching orders from a particularly testy Chihuahua. You had the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers — both answering only to the Holy Father, himself — at each others throats (literally, they’d been engaged in clandestine skirmish warfare against each other for decades) and the Teutonic Knights practicing the decades-old art of IDGAF as they loaded their treasury on ships and sailed away, leaving behind a skeleton force (“You guys are coming back for us, right? Right?”). Then, there were the Italians: the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Pisans, who fought a whole-ass naval battle against one another in Acre’s harbor, including sea to land artillery bombardments, in recent memory. Finally, you had the remnants of the old Crusader nobility, the poulains and other local-born Christians, the allied Saracen merchants, the Jews, and a commune of city burghers all jockeying for position. And all of them were busy undermining each other while the Mamluks sharpened their swords. As an armchair historian, I find all of this fascinating. As a novelist, I find it paralyzing.
If I were writing a history of Acre, I’d need to trace every faction, every grudge, every competing claim to authority. I’d need to explain the War of Saint Sabas (the Venetian-Genoese conflict that tore the city apart in the 1250s-60s). I’d need to detail the military orders’ Byzantine jurisdictional disputes. I’d need to account for the complex relationship between the King in Cyprus and his bailli in Acre, and why the Italian maritime republics could field private armies on Outremer soil. It would be comprehensive. It would be accurate. And it would also bore the living hell out of most readers.
Fiction, though, lets me cheat — and I mean that in the best possible way.
I don’t need to show all of Acre’s dysfunction. I only need to show the dysfunction that matters to my story. If the Venetian-Genoese rivalry isn’t central to my protagonist’s journey, I can reduce it to a handful of vivid details: Genoese toughs blocking a Venetian warehouse, rumors of stabbings and assorted violence, fires in the night as reprisal raids are carried out. I can show, rather than tell, about the Templar-Hospitaller feud by using a pair of recurring characters who are always at each other’s throats (Guillame de Beaujeau and Jean de Villiers, the respective grand-masters of the Orders Militant). The reader doesn’t need to know the three-hundred-year history of the rivalry; they just need to see these two men barely restraining themselves from violence in a council chamber.
The trick is making the complexity feel real without making it actually comprehensive. De Hanapes can tell the envoy, “The dogs of God fight each other as much as the Saracens. The cursed Italians care more for profit than salvation, and the King pretends none of this exists in his so-called Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s reductive as hell from a historical standpoint, but it’s clear. And clarity serves story.
For this particular scene, I’m using physical space to control information flow. De Hanapes and the envoy, Cardinal de Pontville, start in a garden — private, contemplative — where the big picture gets sketched out. Then they move to an upper arcade overlooking the harbor for a meal, where the conversation gets more pointed and they can see the chaos: Saracen merchants trading with Jews and Christians, Italian factions glaring at each other over contested streets, the Templar castle bristling like a gargoyle, the profoundly beautiful Hospital with its core of steel and hatred, and finally . . . a ship docking with fresh arrivals: pilgrims and ersatz crusaders from the stews of Europe lured by the promise of salvation or of plunder (including the protagonist of the tale), and who will author the city’s downfall before the year is out.
The garden gives me room for exposition. The arcade gives me action and observation. And the protagonist’s arrival from a distance gives me a natural scene break and a hook into the next chapter. Movement through space = movement through understanding. This framework keeps the whole thing from turning into two guys sitting in a room info-dumping at each other for twenty pages (“As you know, Cardinal . . .”).
None of this means I’m ignoring history. Lord, no! I’m not a barbarian. It’s information management. Every detail I do include needs to be accurate. The factions I choose to highlight were really there. The tensions were real. The impending doom was real — Acre would fall in May 1291, less than a year after my scene takes place. But fiction lets me be selective. It lets me use the messy truth of history as a foundation, then build a structure on top of it that serves narrative rather than comprehensiveness. History tells us what happened. Fiction tells us what it meant to living people.
And in summer 1290, what it meant was this: Acre was tearing itself apart from within while Sultan Qalawun (and later, his son) sought a pretense to break their ten-year truce and finish what he started with the destruction of Tripoli. Into this stew of hate comes a Papal envoy seeking receipts, and bearing instructions to establish an Inquisition — Nicholas de Hanapes was a Dominican, so this tracks historically (per Crowley). This is the kind of tragically misplaced priority that reveals Rome’s utter disconnect from reality on the ground. You don’t need to know every council member’s name to feel the weight of that irony. You just need to watch two men break bread on an arcade overlooking a harbor, discussing heresy trials while the city they’re looking down their noses at has less than a year to live, while a man cursed by God steps off a boat, looking for salvation.
That’s what fiction can do that history can’t.
Scott Oden
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