A Frankish knight in the charge was one of the most fearsome things in the medieval world — and almost helpless once he was off his horse. Muslim armies understood this exactly. Rather than trade blows with heavy cavalry, Turkish and Ayyubid horse-archers stayed mobile, loosed at the gallop, feigned retreat to draw a rash charge, and above all shot the knights' unarmoured mounts out from under them. "A dismounted Frankish knight," one Crusader-era chronicler noted, "was extremely vulnerable." Slowed by the weight of his mail and half-blind inside a great helm, a knight on the ground had lost the single advantage that made him terrible.

That is the moment King & Country freeze here. The Saracen — trousered and turbaned over his helmet, in a gilded lamellar corselet with a small round buckler on his arm — steps in over a fallen Crusader, curved sword raised for the finishing blow, while the knight, sword still in hand and shield thrown clear, twists on the ground to fend him off. The crusader's chevroned shield is the same device as the Fighting Crusader with Mace, so the two pieces can be displayed as one man's last fight. Stand the vignette before Saladin and the Army of Islam for a full Ayyubid diorama — the pursuit after a broken charge. It is a brutal scene told without a hero: two soldiers, two military worlds, one of them ending.

Model: MK252 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 figure set