It’s a sign of progress that crusaders now only turn up at football matches

How we came to waste so much blood and treasure on these doomed invasions, I will never fully understand

Some England fans have created a stir of sorts at the World Cup in Qatar by traipsing around dressed as crusaders in mock-chainmail and St George’s Cross tabards. While they were reportedly a source of great amusement for some locals who posed for selfies with the men, they were also apparently waylaid by stadium security and have been warned by British anti-racism charities that they are sporting “culturally insensitive” outfits.

Yes, I can see how marching around in a crusader outfit in the Islamic world could “trigger” someone or other, if they’re determined to be triggered. But just as a point of fact, Qatar was never conquered by the crusades. Indeed, the nearest the crusaders ever came to the peninsula was about a thousand miles away when they established several brief periods of rule over Jerusalem. In other words, a Qatari taking offence at a bunch of football fans dressed as Knights Templar is a bit like a Scot taking umbrage at the sight of someone in a Roman centurion costume.

That’s not to defend the crusades, of course. They remain one of the most absurd, barbaric and unnecessary phenomena of Eurasian history. How it is we came to waste so much blood and treasure on these doomed invasions at the behest of the transparently cynical Catholic Church, I will never fully understand. Unlike with the building of Europe’s later empires, which were led by commercial expansion, the crusades had no obvious advantage to the invaders, before we even get to the many peaceable cities they sacked and massacred along the way. The only person to benefit, really, was the Pope.

Let’s be glad, then, that today’s crusaders are nothing but harmless fellows enjoying a bit of cosplay. This, after all, is the point of football: to channel all that tribal, warlike energy into something altogether less expensive and less bloody.

In October, I wrote that the country had been reduced to praying to the weather gods to survive the winter without excessive gas rationing. Whatever we did, whether it was the ritual sacrifice of another PM or the promise of bloody fiscal cuts to come, the gods have smiled upon us.

Thanks to mild weather, the chief executive of Trafigura, one of the world’s biggest oil traders, thinks Europe might escape blackouts not just this winter but also the next. The worry had been that Europe would not be able to refill its gas storage tanks after the winter, as it did this last summer, because of Putin’s embargo. But given the low demand, we may now be able to get enough to top up the tanks via liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports.

Not everyone agrees. The head of LNG for Vitol, Trafigura’s main rival, said this is going to carry on for at least two to three years. It won’t help, of course, that Europe is still very much in cloud-cuckoo land when it comes to planning its energy supplies. While Sinopec has just signed a 27-year LNG deal with Qatar, Europe is holding back, according to an energy analyst quoted by the FT, because of “decarbonisation targets”. That’s right: Germany is going to keep burning coal, because … um, it wants to save the planet.

ARoman emperor of Transylvania called Sponsian, who was dismissed as “fake news”, has been reinstated as real because historians have decided the gold coins he minted are authentic. The coins were declared forgeries in the 19th century but analysis has shown they are very old and well-used.

I never used to understand historical coin nerds, but I am starting to see the appeal. I remember once seeing a gold coin in a museum exhibition that dated back to the eighth century. It bore the name “Offa”, the king of Mercia who built the famous dyke, and depicted him with Roman-style laurel wreaths on his hair. Below that, it said “God is great,” in Arabic, but the craftsmen hadn’t quite got it right: the inscription was upside-down. It was, nonetheless, an object of curious Anglo Saxon cosmopolitanism. Offa seems to have been rather more enlightened than the crusader kings who followed him.