Dan Snow's History Hit - The Crusaders' Last Battle for the Holy Land

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

Roger Crowley is the author of the new book, Accursed Tower: The Crusaders' Last Battle for the Holy Land.The city of Acre, powerfully fortified and richly provisioned, was the last crusader stronghold. When it fell in 1291, two hundred years of Christian crusading in the Holy Land came to a bloody end. Dan had a chat with Roger, which was a nice complement to his podcast with Dan Jones on the Crusades as a whole, earlier in the year.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to you everybody around the world listening to this podcast. I'm excited.

Start of 2020. Big year. Another big year in the history here at Adventure. I hope you enjoyed the roundup, the review of 2019. Some interesting pods we had last year. When you go through it, you realise how lucky I've been talking to these extraordinary people. I mean, in one year alone, I get to talk to Akana. I get to talk to Tony Blair.

I get to talk to Professor Mary Fullbrook, who's written a gigantic survey of the Holocaust. I get to talk to Mary Ellis, who worked at Bletchley Park during the war. I get to talk to Victor Gregg, who was at Arnhem and other places. Stephen Fry. I mean, it's been a good year. And 2020 is going to be pretty sharp too. So I hope you all have a great New Year's, and I hope you're all nursing a hangover and listening to this to provide some blessed relief and distraction and that's exactly what i have for you ladies and gentlemen because this is going to be distracting this is a fantastic podcast it is an interview with roger crowley he really is sort of the king of narrative history he wrote a beautiful book about the indian ocean he's written wonderful we're at constantinople and now he's written a great book called The Crusader's Last Battle for the Holy Land,

featuring the siege of Acre in 1291. Acre, where Richard the Lionheart humiliated Saladin. Where Napoleon would suffer what he later would regard as one of his greatest ever defeats. A defeat few people have heard of, when he was defeated by the Ottoman Turks, supported by the Royal Navy, as he was trying to march his army out of Egypt.

But anyway, in this particular siege, this was the last toehold in the Middle East, in the Levant of the Crusader States, and it was besieged, and it was a very, very dramatic siege, as you will hear. Roger Crowley tells the story brilliantly. We have got, this is a filmed interview like so many of ours, this one will be going up on History Hit TV. Don't forget, everybody, we've got a crazy January sale at the moment. It's pretty mental. You get a month for free, and then you get four months, just one pound, euro, or dollar, or rupee for each of those months.

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Have a great 2020. And get it started in style with Roger Crowley. history are strong. This part of the history of our country all were gone and finished and liquidated. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. Roger, thank you very much for coming on and talking to me. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here,

Dan. Well, I've always been a big fan of yours. The latest book that you're going a little bit further, but I'm a big, you age of sort of early 17th 18th century is my thing. I love maritime history but you're going a bit further back. You're disappearing off joining the crusades gang. Well yes I've been interested in this period for a while for two reasons. One is I'm kind of quite interested in siege warfare and the other is I'm quite interested in Turkic peoples. And the key players in this really are the Mamluks, who are Turkish people, who are a recognizable precursor of the Ottomans. And indeed, the Ottomans wipe out the Mamluk Empire.

So I was kind of tracking back imperial Muslim empires, I suppose, as much as the crusader story itself. But I am very interested in siege warfare and large war machines. And before we get to the age of canon, which we do really with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the high point, I think, of catapult siege warfare happens at the siege acre in 1291. Well, you're a fan of giant siege engines and Turkic peoples, so I'm sure there's many like-minded people out there. So let's talk about this siege. Give me the context in which the siege takes place. Well, the siege takes place as a result of a long decline in the power of the Holy Lands.

I mean, really, if we go back to Saladin at the end of the 12th century, Saladin wipes out 52 villages and pushes the Christians back to the coast. They recover a bit in the 13th century, but in the middle of the 13th century, there's a kind of knock-on effect here. The Mongols take Baghdad, they enter Syria, and at this moment there's a regime change within the Muslim world when the Mamluks, who are a slave army recruited from north of the Black Sea, they're very similar to the Mongols, they take control of Cairo. And these people, they're

outsiders to the Islamic world. They're not popular. They wipe out the last of the Ayyubid sultans. But their legitimacy is very questionable. But they managed to see off the Mongols in one of those epochal battles, really, the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1259, when they defeat a Mongol army. And from that point on, we see the steady advance of the Mamluks under the, I think, the second greatest Sultan of the Crusades, Sultan Baybars. Baybars is a convert to Islam, he's very puritanical and he's absolutely focused and he builds up a very powerful army. At the same time he becomes an expert at siege warfare and And we see in a period, about six years, between 1265 and 1271, when almost all the crusader castles which are guarding the approaches to the coast

are taken one after another. Crac de Chevalier. Crac de Chevalier, as you well know, is the most extraordinary, I think, of his successes. It's a mixture of technical skill and bluff. He dies, but his followers are now on a momentum, really, and this is a one-way ticket for the Crusaders. There is a certain amount of what I'd call military tourism from the West. Edward, Prince of England, who becomes Edward I, arrives,

does a little bit of crusading and goes home again. But really the ability of the West to support the crusader states is disappearing. It's a mixture of credibility, I think, for the papacy, the fact that you can crusade somewhere else in Spain or against the heretics or against the pagans in Prussia. Also, I think the fact that the papacy has been involved in crusading against the Holy Roman Empire has really damaged its credibility. And really the support is giving out. So by the time we get to 1291, we've really got this one small enclave, which is Acre, left.

It's a population of 40,000 people. It's really quite heavily defended, and its key defenders are three military orders, the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights, ready for what is a final showdown, which you might call the Alamo of the Crusades. of what is the final showdown, what you might call the Alamo of the Crusades. Are they receiving much support from... Presumably they have no huge base of population or wealth. They're dependent, are they, on support from Europe?

They are dependent upon support from Europe, particularly from Cyprus, because the king of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which is a bit of a slate of Han, because the Kingdom of Jerusalem doesn't actually have Jerusalem of a slate of hand because the Kingdom of Jerusalem doesn't actually have Jerusalem in it at this point, are the Lusignan kings in Cyprus. And Cyprus is only about two days sailing away. And there is an attempt to get a crusade going in the run-up to the arrival of the Mamluks. But it's a pretty muted effort. Ships do turn up with some crusaders but it's fragmentary by this

stage so really it's the resources of the city itself and some soldiers from Cyprus, the knights of St John, there are some English knights there actually, not very many sent by Edward I, so it's a kind of motley collection of different groups of people and the critical problem and this has always been the problem for Acre is that there is no overall control and command, it's very fragmented, it's always been a very quarrelsome place with all kinds of different groups of people competing, jostling. And in the middle of there, of course, we've got the Italian merchant states, Genoa, Venice and Pisa, who are really not interested in fighting crusades at all and are repeatedly ticked off by the Pope for supplying war materials, military slaves, all kinds of devices to the Mamluks in Egypt.

So in point of fact, Acre is actually being attacked by people who have probably been enslaved and sold, possibly bought and sold actually in Acre, because Acre has its own slave market. So it's being consumed in a sense by its own commercial activity. A lot of those people who came to the walls almost certainly would have come on ships by its own commercial activity, a lot of those people who came to the walls almost certainly would have come on ships of the merchant Italian republics who were there. So you've got... Let me get this right.

You've got enslaved people possibly from the Balkans or...? No, they're mainly from the north coast of the Black Sea. These are Kipchak Turks. They're very similar to the Mongols, nomadic tribal people, great fighters. You learn as a Kipchak Turk, you learn to wield a bow from the age of four. Sounds like my daughter. Absolutely. I'm sure she'd make a good Kipchak Turk. But the Arabs said the Turks are to warfare what the Greeks are to philosophy,

you know. And there's a long history of recruiting slave armies from that area. They did regard these people as being, if you want somebody who's going to fight, send for somebody from the Asian steppes, effectively. So, but being brought on Christian ships. Yeah, there's probably a middleman who intervenes. But actually, the Venetians and the Genoese have got settlements on the northern shores of the Black Sea at this time. And they would have come either across the Black Sea and over land to somewhere like Antioch or a port there.

Or they would probably have come via Constantinople and down the coast. And there's a steady stream of these people who are being recruited. They're Turkish speakers and they're converted to Islam, they're first-generational converts and they have that kind of zealousness, if you like, for the cause. And they're being paid by the Mamluks in Egypt, but helped along that way in some way by Christians. Helped along the way by Christians, yeah. And if you read papal records from about 1190 onwards,

there's a continuous stream of papal interdictions about, and they become more and more technical. You can't supply timber treated or untreated, trying to cover all the different arrangements. But the Genoese and the Venetians do all sorts of things. They put them on third-party ships, they have all sorts of workarounds, and they are from time to time excommunicated for this. But these are people who are working to a completely different formula to the crusader corps. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt,

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. As the Mamluks make this decision to attack Acre, is it seen, I mean, is it heralded as the great final last battle or is it a sort of mopping up operation, or is it talked about in those strategic terms? From the Mamluk point of view, I think they saw it as the last step. They'd taken the county of Tripoli a few years earlier, which is just further to the north. This is all that's left, and this is quite powerful. You know,

this has got 40,000 people in it. It's quite a nut to crack, but it is the moment when I think the Mamluks realize that we can push the Franks into the sea. So they see it as the last stage. And there is, at this point, a huge rallying call to – there's definitely a very jihadi feeling. It said that the volunteers outnumbered the regular troops and we see religious clerics help drag the catapults out of the walls of Damascus ready to be transported. There's also behind this, deep in Islamic memory, the memory of the siege of Acre a hundred years earlier when Saladin's garrison is on the inside, Richard the Lionheart…

Swims into shore. …comes ashore. I'm not quite sure whether he swam into shore. He probably did. And when Acre is recaptured by the Christians, exactly 100 years earlier, exactly almost in the month 1191, there's a deal done between Saladin and Richard the Lionheart that Saladin's going to pay a ransom and Richard is going to let the garrison go. Saladin appears to kind of renege or pause on paying the ransom

and Richard just cuts to the chase. He marches the 3,000 men from the garrison outside the walls of the city and executes them. This is highly contentious, and I don't think anybody's quite got the bottom of exactly whose blame it was. But this is brought back into focus in 1291. You know, remember 1191. And there's kind of a big prophetic element for the Mamluks and Islam in this. And this is actually 100 years earlier. And so there is this great feeling of a kind of religious cause, which probably hasn't been around so strongly since the time of Saladin 100 years earlier. So tell me, how does the siege go? Talk to me, as the man who loves big siege craft,

tell me, how does it go? The siege unfolds with the arrival of the Babylon troops and the setting up of a very large number of giant catapults. This is a huge kind of ergonomic effort, really. The trees for these are cut down in Lebanon. They're hauled to Damascus. This takes a month. They're fashioned into the structure of powerful trebuchets. They're then taken to bits,

dragged to the walls of the city and set up. What is behind this, is two things really. One is I think the psychological element, very much stressed in the Islamic military manuals of the time, that you must erect your catapult in open sight of the enemy because these will be very frightening. And they come with four giant monsters, two of which we know the names of, the victorious and the furious.

We think of these peoples as being great fighters, but also they're incredibly good bean counters, managing their logistics. Not only do you bring the catapults to the walls, you then think, okay, we need to hit these walls with a rock harder than the rock that they're made of. So we know that 20 miles up the road, there's a geological strata which is made of denser rock. So they quarry the rock, they get the masons to carve these beautifully spherical stone walls. They all have to be the same size

if you're going to hit the target consistently. Take these things from the walls. So the kind of planning of this is enormous. There are two strands, really, to siege warfare at this period. One are the catapults, and the other is mining. I set out with the idea of a kind of Hollywood vision of these giant catapults. The stone balls were about 165 kilos max, that they were going to smash walls.

But unfortunately, I was contacted, I got in contact with the man who's written the ultimate PhD on Crusader-era catapults hitting walls, and they couldn't do the damage that you see when you go and watch Netflix, Nightfall or something. What they really did was they were very good at stripping the battlements off, which sort of stopped, everyone had to cower down behind the battlements. Alongside that, they have another trebuchet, a much lighter one called the traction trebuchet, which is men

hauling on a rope. And these can fire extremely fast and they can pepper the walls with... Anti-personnel weapons. Yeah, absolutely. But they've got a lot of these things. They probably came with about 100 catapults. This is an extraordinary concentration of firepower, and so it's a great deal for their organisational skills. They're contemporaneous with the famous war wolf, Edward I's war wolf, presumably. Absolutely. I'm fascinated by the war wolf because the psychological effect of the war wolf is extraordinary, wasn't it? He has this great machine built. He takes it to the walls of Stirling Castle, and it's all set to go. And the Scots inside take one look at this thing and say,

OK, I think we'll just surrender at this point. But Edward hasn't dragged this thing all the way to the walls, had it made great expense. He says, no, no, go back inside. You know, I'm going to bombard you. He's not going to let them off that lightly. So undoubtedly the psychological terror of these things, hitting walls, was very, very frightening.

But the real damage is going to be done by the miners. What the catapults do, I think, is really stop any kind of counter fire because if you put up this heavy enough bombardment, everybody's ducking down behind the walls, you can put up screens quite close to the walls and then you get a thousand Aleppo miners to start digging mines under the walls.

The Christians dug counter mines and they obviously had skills but they simply didn't have the resources. The Mamluks could perhaps put up a dozen mining tunnels in different places. The Christians could respond by undermining and attacking one of them, and they would be fighting in the dark and they would have pulled them down. But they really couldn't match the number of people. We don't know how many people the Mamluks brought to the walls,

but numbers are always apocryphal in these things. People talk about 100,000, and then people talk about 400,000. But by the time you've tried to count the people and their horses and so on, there was probably about 40,000 fighting men, and there might have been the same number of volunteers. We just don't know. But the Mamluks always wanted a quick knockout blow. They are not into attritional sieges. They've got the manpower, they can afford to lose men, and you need to persuade people to die when it comes to the final assault. And this is where the religious element, along with rewards for people, comes into play. The defenders try external sorties to disrupt the

catapults, they try to set fire to some of the catapults, but they're ultimately not successful, there just aren't enough of them, and the perimeter of the Mamluk camp is too well guarded. I've read quite a lot of accounts of warfare over the years and one of the places I would least like to be in the history of the world is in a tunnel during a siege operation, which is then broken into by a counter tunnel and fighting amid sort of rock slides and things in the dark against an enemy that surprised you. I mean, that's pretty grim.

Absolutely nightmarish. You hear these tales of fighting and people pulling down pit props and suffocating miners. It is grim beyond grim. I think you're absolutely right. It's kind of, you know, it's real grunt work. But it was very skilled work. The tunnels that the mammoths dug were only about a metre and a half wide,

just wide enough for two men. And there would be specialist miners, there'd be spoil removers, and then when you get to the point where you actually want to bring down the wall, you create a slightly larger room, and then you get specialist guys who create a quite hot fire, quite large fire, to crack the rocks above. And so the specialist roles are very carefully defined, but it's pretty awful work. And they do manage to bring down the walls, do they?

They do, yes. There's a period after about four weeks when we suddenly start to see the collapse of towers and curtain walls. Then the problem for the Mamluks is that although they've brought down a section of the wall, it's strewn with rubble, and it's very, very difficult for men to advance across. At this point, their ingenuity is extraordinary. They erect a kind of felt screen, a huge felt screen, which the Christians can't fire through. And under cover of night,

I think they have the nose bags of horses. There's a lot of sand on a very beautiful sandy beach outside here. They fill these things up with sand like sandbags and they create a roadway for their troops to advance over. So in the morning from behind the screen they've created a pathway for the troops to advance. Their kind of practical skills are extraordinary. And again, this goes with having a very large number of men to do it, but it's extraordinary work. And is there then a big fight in the breach? There is a big fight in the breach at various points up and down the walls. There are about

two or three places they go to. There's a gateway of St. Anthony, and the other is the critical gate called the Accursed Tower, which was the gateway into the inner town. There's also a massive bombardment, I think, by Greek fire. They have people who lob ceramic grenades, they have people who fire flaming arrows, and there's a horrific account of an English knight being hit by Greek fire and just going up like a wick. It's a little bit like a sort of Napalm-esque... Yes, it's like, yes, yes, absolutely, yes. And they could lob this from catapults as well.

Although we don't know whether they did lob catapults of Greek fire, they could have had people with slingshots firing these ceramic grenades over the walls in the movie version of your book i can guarantee they'll be lobbing greek fire all over the place they will it will be i mean it it does end up as uh one of the christian sources said a land lit up by fire um there is heroic defense of various places and but the kind of critical moment comes when the the knights of saint john then the templars and the comes when the knights of St John, the Templars and the Teutonic knights are all fighting in the front line. As I say, the walls were divided up into different sectors

which were managed by different people but the Grand Master of the Templars is hit and he says, I've got to go, I'm dying and he says, I've got to go, I'm dying. And he undoubtedly is dying, but this kind of spooks the defence in one section of the walls. The trouble with this is, the sources we have, the best source we have is written by a guy who worked for the Templars called the Templar of Tyre, who writes a fantastic account. And we really can't be sure how skewed any source that we get in this period is. You try and read between the

lines, but this undoubtedly was a heavy blow. And then they march, they proceed into the town. Acre is an extraordinary town. It's a town of little lanes and alleyways, ideal for street fighting. But the Mamluks are technically very skilled in this. They advance with locked shields, a bit like a sort of Roman phalanx, bombard from behind the shields, then move forward and move forward. There's a certain amount of defence from the rooftops, people hurling stuff down on them, but they are hopelessly outnumbered,

and then it just turns into a rout, and everybody runs for the harbour, trying to get away. Do they manage, or is there a massacre? There is a massacre. Not coincidentally, the people who get away tend to be the wealthier. There are not very many ships available and as luck will have it, the sea is very rough. And it's a question of ferrying people out in dinghies

out to the ships offshore. There's some disgraceful behavior, particularly by a man called Roger de Flore, who is a Catalan, who is said to have held the wealthy women to ransom. They come down to the sea, clutching their jewels and so on, you know, take me aboard.

And he only takes the wealthy on board. He is said to have become incredibly wealthy in a way. He gets control of a Templar ship. And you could probably see the same thing happen at the fall of Smyrna in the 20th century, the same kind of thing. It's the poor who suffer. The poor, the old are probably killed. We never know how many people are killed, but there is a massive slave market comes out of this. know how many people are killed but there is a massive slave market comes out of this. The Christian accounts are very tearful about children being separated from their parents and people being left to die and so on. But I think that the massacre story is, you can't

get to the bottom of it. There is an extraordinary final stand in this which is in the Templars' fort, which overlooks the sea. And they're holed up there. They agree a truce with the Mamluks. The white flag goes up. They're allowed to leave without arms. Some Mamluk troops go inside the fort, nominally to arrange the truce, but then start grabbing the women and children. The knights are not having this, they massacre the intruders, shut the gate and then they're going to go down to the last man and it ends up with the the Templar fort being undermined and according to slightly apocryphal stories but probably not totally, there's a final massacre. The undermining of a central tower,

it makes it very unstable. A whole group of Mamluks and Muslims go in, the tower collapses and kills 2,000 people. So it's a sort of grand finale to the whole thing. They're all killed alongside each other. They're all killed alongside each other, yes. How much of that is true? I think there's some truth in it, but everybody is talking up in all sorts of ways, I think. You read between the sources as best you can, and I try and balance the sources. I had all the relevant Arabic sources translated

to kind of try and balance the story between the two sides. And that was the end of the Crusader states in the Levant, was it? That was. All the land was lost, said the Templar of Tyre, who actually got away. This wasn't perceived like this in Rome. They thought that there would be a comeback. But people on the ground could see this wasn't going to happen. There's a kind of scorched earth policy.

Saladin had made a terrible mistake in not occupying Tyre in a century earlier. And this would have been the landing stage for the Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade. They're not going to repeat this. So they destroy Acre, they destroy all the harbour infrastructure up and down the coast, they destroy a great deal of agricultural fertility, irrigation systems, mills and so on. So that it's rather like salting Carthage effectively in the, you know, collapse of the Roman final conquest of Carthage. So that there's nothing for them to come back for. There's no foothold. And this is the end. And it's the end not only because of militarily

but because of changes in the in the temperature if you like of Christian Europe. Until interestingly this is a footnote isn't it, because Napoleon arrives back in several centuries later, the late 18th century, and suffers his most famous, well least famous but most important defeat. Yes. At the same site in Acre. Absolutely yes I mean he commands his operations from the same hill that the Mamluks did. Everybody wants to take this, sets out on this hill. And actually there's a giant metal statue of Napoleon on his horse on the top of this now, which looks like one of those, you know those sort of Spanish brandy,

in the countryside, of bulls. It's rather like the Napoleon brandy on the top of the hill. Yes, he does. And his problem was, I think, that he couldn't... I think his siege guns never made it to the walls. I think the British Navy managed to interfere with that. And, yeah, he fails. And this is kind of like the high point, I think, of his Oriental venture.

And he famously says about the British naval officer who was helping the Ottoman Turks, he says, that man cost me my destiny. He identifies him rather than anyone else in his career. I love that. Anyway, that's a postscript for the story. I didn't know that, but yeah, fascinating. Thank you very much. The book is fabulous. It's called? It's called Accursed Tower. Nice. And you can read the book before it is serialised on Netflix

in a multi-million pound dramatisation, I hope. I will look away from the treatment they give to the catapults. Well, as a big siege engine fan, you're going to have to just take the check and just, you know, swallow. Yeah. OK, thank you very much. Thank you very much. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All the traditions of ours, have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history

our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished and liquidated one child one teacher one book

and one pen can change the world he tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, everyone. Just massive favour to ask if you could go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, give it a five stars obviously and they'd leave a glowing review that'd be great my mum is getting overwhelmed by the amount of different email accounts she's set up to leave good reviews for me so you're gonna have to do some of the heavy lifting thank you

douglas adams the genius behind the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.