I am just reading Sir Tommy Macpherson’s autobiography and he mentions an anecdote from his post war life when he visited colonial Nigeria. The book is an account of his time fighting the Nazis with the French and Italian resistance in WW2, and has nothing to with Africa or the Crusades (and he is by no means an expert on either topic), but it is such random aside I had to fact-check it (no luck on Google).
He claims that:
- Nigerian Muslims joined Saladin’s army fighting against the third Crusade in the holy land.
- They returned with captured crusader armour that Macpherson saw (preserved by the desert conditions) when he visited the Islamic regions of Nigeria while it was a British colony after the war.
Are either of these facts verifiable?
Verifiable? I doubt it. Not unless the armor MacPherson saw was still there today to be tested and examined.
Conceivable? Yes, barely. The Kanem state extended into northeastern Nigeria by about then and was nominally Muslim ( at least the rulers were ). In the early 13th century it was maintaining semi-steady contact with Egypt to facilitate the pilgrimage to Mecca, so some slight presence would not be outlandish. Individual participation by a random pilgrim or three that were coincidentally in the area and returning with a prize is possible. There are surviving fragments of armor from that period in museums here and there.
However is it likely? Not very, just based on Occam’s Razor. The region has a long history of mailed horsemen, so labeling a random set of armor as Crusader gear would be easy to do. It might even be quite old and the owners had bought into a legend passed down to them. But unless MacPherson was truly an expert, far more likely it was indigenous work with a fancy legend attached.