Dan Snow's History Hit - The Crusades with Dan Jones

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

The two Dans are back. And this time, they're talking all things crusades. In this rerun episode, Dan Jones provides his namesake host with a thrilling background to the series of holy wars that have come to define Medieval Europe.

Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm Dan Snow and today we're going to be talking about the Crusades with Dan Jones, somebody with whom I am regularly mistaken. That's extremely flattering because Dan Jones is one of the best narrative historians on earth. His books have sold millions of copies. His programme he made in the Knights Templar, which is on historyhit.tv, is one of the most successful

programmes we have ever made on our new digital history channel. And this episode is a rerun of one we first recorded a couple of years ago. Went round to Dan Jones' house, and we talked about the Crusades. I tried to get him to run me through all the Crusades, from one to, depends how you count them, but you know, seven-ish. And that's, of course, before you get involved in the Crusades in mainland Europe. Don't even start me on those. So there is, of course, plenty to talk about. While we're on the subject, the most glorious castles I have ever visited in my life

are the Crusader castles. Aleppo, Jerash, Salah ad-Din's castle in Syria. Just google it, just google it. Kerak, Crac de Chevalier, they are unbelievable. Bizarrely, I was there as the Syrian civil war was breaking out I was making a program about those castles it made them have been terribly damaged in that war you can watch programs like the crusades you can watch programs with Dan Jones over on historyhit.tv

and over there we've got tens of thousands of subscribers it's the world's best history channel it's like Netflix for history you're gonna love it just cruise on over to historyhit.tv and get a month for free check it out see if you like it in the meantime though everybody here is dan jones talking about the crusades dan jones thank you very much for coming back on the show. It's a big subject. One of the biggest.

When you set out to write about the Crusades, are you mindful of what they mean to people today? This is not just a kind of abstract, sort of self-contained bit of medieval history. I'm always interested in topics that can draw like the Middle Ages together with the modern. So things that people will have heard of, you know, to put it at its simplest. and i think crusades is one of those terms that's just bled into our vocabulary today

so while i've been writing i've had a google alert for crusades and every day it comes up with some really amazing stuff so you know you get political stuff like boris johnson is on a crusade to hire more police officers or whatever, or, you know, the Chinese are on a crusade to, I don't know, destroy the American economy or whatever it may be. One came through this week from a website which said, Dr. Jen Gunter is on a crusade to save your vagina. And I mean, that is not an appropriate mental image but so it shows you the way that Crusades has bled into our language it also has less humorous political implications and uses so the alt-right we know the Crusades is absolute catnip for the alt-right and if you look at for example the manifesto of the guy who shot up the mosques in Christchurch earlier this year, full of Crusades

references. He daubed Crusader battles all over the weapons he was using. The manifesto said things like, what would Pope Urban II do? And on the other side, if you like, when ISIS-affiliated groups bombed hotels and churches in Sri Lanka this Easter. Again, the statements taking credit for it said things like, we've attacked citizens of the Crusader Coalition on their infidel holiday. So what that says to you is that there are people in this world who believe that in some sense the Crusades are still continuing. And for that reason, if none other, I think it's worth considering and writing about what the Crusades were really about, partly so we can understand

the difference between the history and what's happening today, and partly so we can see that this is really something that doesn't bear repeating. What do people mean by the Crusades? Well, if you've been around at the time of the Crusades, so what we're talking about now, roughly speaking, is from the end of the 11th century, 1090s, you could date it earlier to 1060s, as I do in the book, through to, I finish a story in 1492, end of the 15th century. Nobody at that time was talking about going on crusades. It's quite a historian's term. However, they knew very well what a crusader was. So a crusader was somebody who'd responded to the call of the papacy, the call of a pope, to go and fight a holy war in the name of Christ against

the enemies of the church. Now at the beginning of the period that meant, in the case of the First Crusade, marching overland from Western Europe to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, to assist the Byzantine emperor there in his war against the Turks who were dismembering piece by piece Byzantine territories in Asia Minor and then marching on to Jerusalem to quote-unquote liberate Jerusalem from Islamic rule. That's the sort of centerpiece of the Crusades. Jerusalem was taken 1099, a series of crusader states were set up in what's now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. up in what's now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. But there were other crusading arenas as well. So there were holy wars being fought between Christian powers and Islamic powers in modern Spain and Portugal. There were wars being fought against pagans in the Baltic. There was

the Albigensian Crusade against Cathar heretics in southern France. There were wars fought in Egypt, in North Africa. There were, eventually, by the time you get towards the high Middle Ages and the end of the Middle Ages, there are wars being fought between rival Christian powers all over Europe that are being called Crusades. You could sort of just apply to the Pope and have your war rubber stamped as a Crusade. sort of just apply to the Pope and have your war rubber stamped as a crusade.

And that gave it some spiritual legitimacy or apparent validity that it might otherwise have lacked. So the idea of the crusade, in short, I guess, is about fighting the perceived enemies of the church. What was clearer was what a crusader was. Now, if you'd agreed to join in one of these wars, whichever it might be, you took a formal vow that you were going to go on crusade. Your reward for doing so was remission of sins. In other words, all the sins that you'd committed on earth, if you confessed them, then by going on crusade or going to fight for the church, you would be excused those sins. So your passage to heaven would be made much speedier than it would have been otherwise.

You were marked out as a crusader by having sewn or pinned onto your clothes a cross made of cloth. Or in some cases, if you're feeling pretty extreme about it, you might decide to carve the cross into your forehead or brand it on your skin. These are all sort of possibilities. But the idea is, in Latin, the word crusis ignati, one signed with the cross. And everybody knew what a crusader looked like.

They didn't all look the same. Our image today is of a Templar knight, usually, when we think about crusaders. We can talk a bit about this, but that's not at all what all crusaders looked like. However, it was pretty obvious to anyone at the time who was a crusader and who wasn't. Why does crusading happen? Why does it start? As usual, you're asking the simple questions, but they are the most complex answers. So if you want to, usually when people tell the story of the Crusades, they start with Pope Urban II at Clermont in France, 1095, and he just

apparently out of nowhere stands up and says, right, lads, I've got an idea. We're going to head to Constantinople and Jerusalem, liberate Constantinople, liberate Jerusalem, and the reward will be, you know, remission of sins. You'll find it in heaven. And often that seems very weird and seems to be just an illustration of how bizarre medieval people were. Actually, of course, if you look at the history of crusading, you see something rather different. During the sort of 1060s, 1070s, 1080s, a lot of different sort of political and military and theological strands all sort of coalesced and came together. It was undoubtedly true that the Byzantine Empire was under threat from Turkic warlords pushing westwards through Asia Minor. The Byzantine Emperor had, or a succession of emperors, had made appeals to the West, to Christians of the West, saying, come and help us. There was also the fact that there was a schism between the Eastern and Western churches and a succession of popes had scratched their heads over ways that this schism, this falling out, could be fixed, could be reconciled.

In Western Europe, within Western Christendom, there was similarly a long history of political tension between popes on the one hand and secular rulers, particularly German emperors on the other. And there was a need to reconcile that situation. In Spain and Portugal, there'd been wars between Christian powers and Islamic powers going on from the 1060s, clashes all over. You could date clashes between Islamic powers and Christian powers in Spain as far back as the 8th century if you really wanted to. In Sicily, there'd been, you know, the Normans had arrived in Sicily and conquered Sicily from the Arabs.

And, you know, the Islamic take on the beginning of the Crusades is actually that if you look around the Mediterranean in 1060s, 1070s, you see all over the place clashes between Christian and Muslim powers. And what happens in the 1090s is that these are sort of drawn together and given a sort of unifying framework by Urban II. So there are all of these different strands coming together, but something definitely

happens in the 1090s. There's another major appeal from Byzantium to the West. Urban II becomes Pope and really arrives as Pope with a very strong urge to do something about both schism between East and West and Church and political tensions within Western Christendom. And he latches onto the idea of getting people to go and fight in the name of Christ as a solution for all of these problems. You can address all of these problems in one go if you call for a mass military expedition under the banner of the papacy. I mean, are there mercenary reasons why people are going?

I mean, is there a sense that you're going to benefit, not just in the afterlife, but in the present life as well? Yeah, I think a lot of people went crusading with a whole sort of ragtag, mixed bag of motivations they carried with them. Remission of sins might be very important and was very important to a lot of people. It was a very appealing idea that you could sort of wipe the slate clean and start again if you went on this journey.

I think there's a, in the late 11th century, there is a sort of acquisitive military class of knights whose whole stock in trade is going and fighting and that's how you earned your living. You fought because you got paid, You fought because you collected booty. And this seemed like a promising place to go. A lot of the Crusaders or the leaders of the Crusade found that eventually when the Crusader states in the East were set up,

that here was sort of virgin territory that could be carved into Western-style feudal little blocks, you know. And so you had kings and counts and princes and all the sort of the aristocratic ranks that were familiar from Western Europe and the land that came with it. And throughout the history of crusading, you do see a lot of people who go crusading because there's money in it. I mean, my favourite of those, I think, after the first crusade at the beginning of the 12th century um the first west major western king to visit the crusader states to visit the east is a guy

called sigurd the first king of norway city the first king of norway was a christian but he was also essentially a sort of late period Viking. And his stock in trade of the Vikings, as you know very well, is go forth and plunder. Sigurd I of Norway became king at the age of 13. His brother was co-king, decided that Norway wasn't big enough for the two of them. They set off with, so the bards tell us, 60 ships, 10,000 men, probably not quite that many, and went on this incredible plundering mission around, well, he went to England, then France, and then stopped off all the way down the coast of what's now Spain and Portugal, plundering as he went, attacking Muslim townsfolk, pirates, you name it.

He'd attack them, take their ships, take their gold, take their women, move on, and through the Straits of Gibraltar, did the same in the Balearic Islands, you know, Menorca, Formentera, stopped off in Sicily, partied a bit with the King of Sicily, another, you know, young Roger II of Sicily. By the time he wound up in the Holy Land, helped with the siege of Sidon, By the time he wound up in the Holy Land, helped with the siege of Sidon, travelled to Jerusalem, was given a little fragment of Christ's cross. By the time he left the Holy Land, heading for Constantinople, he had so much booty that they were attaching it to the masts and the sails of the ships. And he was glinting in the sun as they went. So I think, you know, you look at a character like Sigurd of Norway or later in the period, the merchants from Venice and Pisa and Genoa

who went crusading because they could set themselves up in newly conquered crusader cities and have extremely lucrative trading privileges there. You look at people like that and say, probably the primary motivation for going crusading was uh gold was wealth but i don't think you can say it was the only motivation because of course we're dealing with a much more religious society than we live in today in the west and uh it's always very hard to untangle people's motivations. The analogy I use usually is you've never been to a pub

and sat next to the kind of the boar who tells you that the Iraq war was all about the oil. And you think about that and say, well, I'm sure there was a little bit, maybe even a lot bit of the motivation of the second Gulf War had to do with oil. But you can't disentangle that from George W. Bush's deeply held Christian faith. You know, people like Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that if you put biblical slogans on papers that went on W.'s desk, he was more likely to read them. His Christianity played a role, his genuine attachment to neoliberal democratic ideas, or at least...

It's not just about the oil. And in the same way in the Crusades, it's never just about the gold. So it sounds to me like you're saying that there is something big going on here. I mean, obviously, 12th century societies, 11th century societies didn't need much cause to go to war against each other but there is a bigger idea here happening yeah i think that's fair and i think that um if you take away the brand of the crusade as as we've quite often attached it as historians but as also existed at the time. You could see that there had been clashes. For example, Spain and Portugal is a great example.

There had been clashes between Muslim and Christian powers in Spain and Portugal for not just decades, but for centuries before the crusading period. You know, when Gibbon wrote about this, he traced the history all the way back to the 8th century. So when we look at the Crusading period, we're often applying this idea to wars that would probably have been going on anyway. Of course, there'd have been clashes between Christian powers and Muslim powers in modern Spain and Portugal. That's just the way that geography had dictated it. However, of course, once the idea of crusading is out there in the wild, you have a feedback loop between motivation and political fact and

wars that would have been going on anyway anyway are probably exacerbated by the fact of the crusade or legitimized or justified do you see what i mean so the two things enter into a relationship with one another how many crusades were there well the numbering of the crusades uh is is a bit of a sticky issue people usually give up after five okay and so often people say oh there are eight or nine numbered Crusades which went to mostly aimed towards Jerusalem, even if they didn't get there. I mean, we're in pretty good agreement

up to the fifth. And then they start to get other titles like the Baron's Crusade or the Crusade of Louis IX. And even I sometimes lose track of, wait, was that the seventh or the eighth? The point is, there were tons and tons of them. But those were just the Crusades to the east. All right, Dan Jones, you're the expert.

Let's go through the Crusades. Start at number one. What happened? Potted history of the First Crusade. 1095, Urban II stands up and says, let's go fight. We're going to go to Constantinople, and we're going to help the Byzantine Empire, which is under attack from Turkish warlords heading through Asia Minor. And then we're going to go on, and we're going to help the Byzantine Empire, which is under attack from Turkish warlords heading through Asia Minor.

And then we're going to go on and we're going to take Jerusalem. And this sounds like a crazy scheme. In many ways, it is a crazy scheme, but somehow or other, it works. There are various waves of people set off from Western Europe. The first known as the People's Crusade, led by a man called Peter the Hermit, a sort of a shabby demagogue who has the rare ability to rouse the basest instincts in people and give it the veneer or the patina of respectability, a sort of sackcloth wearing Dominic Cummings, if you like, who bounces along and rowdy and intemperate people find him very charming and follow him. The People's Crusade sets off through the Rhineland, the terrible pogroms and massacres of Jewish people in cities like Mainz and Worms. These sort of rabble, very unsuited to fighting

most of them, head off down the Danube, go through the Balkans, wind up in Constantinople, heavily depleted because along the way they've usually annoyed everybody in this territory they've gone through and been periodically massacred themselves. And they wind up in Constantinople in pretty bad shape. Behind them comes a much more organised wave of crusaders, sometimes called the Prince's Crusade. This is led by aristocratic people, quite a lot of Normans of southern Italy involved, men like Beaumont of Toronto, southern French lords like Raymond of Toulouse, there's a papal legate, Adama of Lepuy. It's a bit more organised. This is the sort of crusade that Urban II had in mind, people who were competent and capable and able to fight. Well, they set off along broadly the same route,

down the Danube, through the Balkans, Constantinople. And then all of the crusaders, sort of a mass in Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus and aided with some Byzantine military advisers, head out into Turkish-held Asia Minor. And I suspect that the emperor, Alexios Komnenos, didn't think he'd see them again. However, miraculously, as it appeared to them, they survived. Two great military engagements, one at Nicaea, one at Dorylaeum 1097,

Two great military engagements, one at Nicaea, one at Dorylaeum, 1097. They made it through Asia Minor, came down out of the mountains into northern Syria, besieged the great city of Antioch, managed to take Antioch. Incredible military feat. Were then themselves besieged in Antioch and fought off their besiegers. Marched down the coast. July 1099 besieged Jerusalem itself and took Jerusalem. And that was the miraculous end goal of the First Crusade achieved. Incredible, absolutely incredible. Urban the Second never heard about it because he died before news of the fall of Jerusalem could reach him.

However, this crazy mission that he preached in 1095, four years later, nearly four years later, had somehow come to fruition. In some ways, it would have been better for everybody if it had failed in Asia Minor, because now, having taken Jerusalem, Jerusalem had to be defended. failed in Asia Minor because now, having taken Jerusalem, Jerusalem had to be defended. Jerusalem, the place of Christ's ministry, of his death, of his resurrection, the centre of the world, if you look at medieval maps of the time, could not be lost. That once had been taken.

So around Jerusalem and other cities in the region that had been conquered were set up a series of crusader estates. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch in the north. And from this point on the story of the crusades is really one of desperate attempts to resupply, to fortify, to embed new waves of settlers and to revenge on those periods, on those occasions when important parts of these crusader states were conquered hi everyone you're listening to history we got dan jones on talking about the crusades more after this some things just take too long a meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto,

or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

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are new episodes every week Did this come at a bad time for the Islamic world? I mean, was there an element of luck involved? Was there a crisis that meant that the forces of the caliphate were less likely to be able to fight back? of the caliphate were less likely to be able to fight back. When you read the Islamic sources trying to make sense of the first crusade, it's very striking. Two things are very striking. The first is that they tend to view it in a much broader context than the Christian sources, who see this as a one-off God-sent miracle.

Ibn al-Athir, the great Iraqi chronicler of the crusading period, says this was all part of a very strange phenomenon where the Christian powers were on the march against Muslim powers across the Mediterranean. But he specifically, and other chroniclers, specifically attribute the success of the first crusade to the um to the fractured um disunified nature of the islamic world of the near east you had the great seljuk empire a sort of turkic sunni empire ruled from capitals including merv and baghdad was splintering and weakening and authority was falling apart and various different rival

Atabegs and emirs ruling rival cities Mosul and Damascus and Aleppo were all at war with each other. To the south you had the Fatimid Caliphate based in Cairo and Shiite implacably opposed to the Sunni Turks further north. These two were enemies as well. And so the explanation given in a lot of Islamic sources is because the Muslim world was in a state of disunity, the Franks, as they called them, the French, marched in and took advantage of that situation. So that's absolutely the way it's understood in those narratives.

Second Crusade. We mentioned the County of Edessa. County of Edessa had been set up, in fact, it was the first of the Crusader states to be set up during the First Crusade. But in 1144, it was the capital city, Edessa, and much territory around it was taken by Zengi, a fierce and extremely violent and drunken warlord. News of

this got back to the West, where crusading enthusiasm had really been dipping in the centuries following the First Crusade, but shock horror when Edessa demonstrated how sort of weak and sort of lily-livered the new generation of rulers in the West had become in comparison to their brave and bold forefathers. The crusade was principally led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III, the German king. Both of them led armies which went deliberately in the footsteps of their forefathers. They tried to go overland when a sea route might have been a better idea. They tried to go overland when a sea route might have been a better idea. To Constantinople, across the Bosphorus, through Asia Minor, Antioch, down to Jerusalem.

Same route as the first Crusaders. Terrible, terrible idea absolutely terrible idea because among many other reasons louis the seventh and conrad the third were not a patch on the leaders of the first crusade louis the seventh in particular his wife elena of aquitaine described him as more a monk than a king and he was useless as a as a military leader in that context. The Turks of Oceania had their stuff together. They were much more organised than they had been in the 1090s. And so the armies of the Second Crusade were butchered and very lucky to make it to the Holy Land at all. By the time they got there, Edessa was long gone.

Zengi was dead, and they were scratching their heads as to what on earth they were going to do. So a sort of ham-fisted plot or plan of action was cooked up by which they were just going to go and attack Damascus. Why Damascus? Well, strategically quite important city, very important city, very wealthy, but not the sort of place you go and be seized just with a plan worked out on the back of a fag packet. The Siege of Damascus was an absolute fiasco. It was over within a week and the crusade broke up in some acrimony. Louis VII of France stayed

in the Holy Land for a bit, touring the shrines, but he'd fallen out massively with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was subsequently accused of having an affair with her uncle, Prince of Antioch. By the time they got back to the West, they were ready to be divorced, and English and French history took a different course because of that. Not a crusade to be proud of. In fact, there were two interesting achievements in the Second Crusade. The first was that English and Flemish crusaders who did take a sea route rather than the overland route, on their way round what's now Portugal,

conquered the significant and very wealthy Islamic city of Lisbon. We call it Lisbon now. And that was a major gain for the Second Crusade in 1147. In some ways, even more important was the fact that there were some German nobles in Saxony in 1147 who decided they didn't really fancy the trip to Jerusalem. And they petitioned the Pope successfully to be allowed to attack non-Christians closer to home, pagan people in the Baltic states.

And the Wendish Crusade, as it's known, a minor crusade, which took place in 1147, 1148, started a pattern of crusading against Baltic pagans, eventually in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, up to Finland, which would continue for hundreds of years and become a major, major crusading arena, particularly in the later Middle Ages. So that probably was the most important lasting outcome of the Second Crusade, not the fiasco in the Holy Land. Number three.

Third Crusade. Everyone knows about the Third Crusade. This is Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. If you close your eyes and think of a crusade everyone knows about the third crusade this is richard the lionheart and saladin if you close your eyes and think of a crusade if you you ever do such a thing it's probably the third crusade you're thinking about 1187 city of jerusalem was taken by saladin a great uh kurdish general who'd risen to become um sultan of egypt and syria united, united the Islamic world under Sunni rule, crushed the Fatimid caliphate, deposed the last caliph,

and was now taking aim under the banner of jihad against the Christians of the Crusader States. Destroyed a Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin on the 4th of July 1187, subsequently marched on Jerusalem and took it. Jerusalem fell, the relic of the true cross was captured, the king of Jerusalem was captured. Seismic shock went through the Christian world, particularly in the West.

And kings, including Philip Augustus of France, Philip II of France, and Richard I, the new king of England, Richard the Lionheart, answered the call to crusade, turned their kingdoms over to preparing for war, sailed to the Holy Land, successfully besieged the city of Acre, which would become the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, went on a march down the coast, fighting Saladin's armies all the way. Richard twice approached Jerusalem with the intention of taking it back from Saladin and twice realised he didn't have the numbers to do it. So eventually brokered peace with Saladin, took ships and went home. A heroic sort of legend sprang up around the Third Crusade

almost from the minute it was taking place. I mean both Richard and Saladin surrounded themselves with people whom they knew were going to write their stories and write them up in the most kind of chivalric and heroic way imaginable. It's a very familiar story and actually one of the fun things I did when I was writing Crusaders was to take a slightly different approach to it. So I discovered a character called Margaret of Beverley. Well, I came across her, I didn't discover her,

and scholars knew about her, but no one's really written about her at any length in a sort of popular book about the Crusades. Margaret of Beverley gives you a great view of the Third Crusade because she's a sort of Yorkshire lass who goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and gets stuck in Jerusalem when Saladin's armies are outside the walls. And the account of her terrible time during the Third Crusade has her on the walls of Jerusalem with a slingshot throwing stones at Saladin's army and wearing a cooking pot for a helmet on her head. And she has the most incredible adventures

around the Holy Land. So when I was writing about the Third Crusade, I really tried hard to give a woman's view of what the Third Crusade was all about. So that was fun. Fourth Crusade? Fourth Crusade. Absolute joke, the Fourth Crusade. I Crusade. Absolute joke, Fourth Crusade.

I mean, really an extraordinary event. We don't talk about the Fourth Crusade too much because it was extremely disreputable at every stage. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz.

Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca. 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 In the right at the end of the 12th century, after the third crusade had just sort of narrowly failed to take Jerusalem, a new crusade was launched.

And it was sort of taken up relatively enthusiastically by a small group of french lords but it was very clear that there weren't going to be any kings this time going crusading so this group of french lords scratched their heads a bit and thought how are we going to get armies ourselves to the holy land so they went to ven, the greatest shipbuilding merchant republic of the Adriatic. And they broke a deal with the rulers of Venice, and principally the 90-year-old blind doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, by which Venice would build them sufficient ships to carry a vast army. The secret destination was Alexandria in northern Egypt, from which they'd then proceed on to Jerusalem.

So for a year, Venice and all its labourers and its shipbuilders and its merchants toiled to prepare a crusading fleet. fleet. A year later, when they had indeed prepared sort of a hundred odd ships, galleys, and provisioned them sufficiently for a major army to go to the Holy Land, the French turned up and they had barely a third of the number of people that they thought they'd been able to raise. They had nothing like the amount of money that they were in the hole for to the Venetians and so they all looked at each other and realized that there was only one possible outcome and that was that the venetians were now going to be in charge of the crusade uh and so instead of going to alexandria and on to jerusalem the crusading fleet left venice went to the Croatian coast, the city of Zara, where a Christian

crusading population hung like crosses from the walls and said, we're crusaders too. Venetians didn't care. They had beef with the citizens of Zara. They thought they should be obedient to Venice instead of Hungary. And so they pillaged a major Christian city, pillaged a major Christian city, burned half of it to the ground and left out. They then went on to an even bigger Christian city, the city of Constantinople. And through a series of sort of torturous politics involving rival claimants to the imperial throne in Constantinople, you ended up with the rather shameful sight in 1204 of the crusaders on the Fourth Crusade, scaling the walls of Constantinople, invading the city, pillaging it, burning acres of it to the ground. I mean, if anyone's watched the end of Game of Thrones, you remember

dragons over king's landing. That's what we're talking about in the Fourth Crusade. The Venetians, very happily for them, made their money back probably several times over. And if you go to Venice to Mark's Basilica today, you can still see the great bronze horses that they nicked from Constantinople and took back to Venice. Enrico Dandolo, the blind 90-something-year-old doge,

died in Constantinople in 1205 and was the only person ever, I think, to be buried in the Hagia Sophia. This spelled really the end for the Byzantine Greek Empire. A Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin of Flanders, was installed. And then he had a series of sort of rather tin-pot Latin emperors before a weakened and fairly unstable Byzantine restoration. The upshot of the Fourth Crusade was the destruction of a Christian empire. The destruction of two very important, one extremely important Christian cities. Absolutely no crusading done against any Muslim enemies at all, save for a few lords like Simon de Moffat the Elder and others who realised pretty early on the way the wind was blowing, left the crusade and went themselves on a

sort of armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but nothing of any serious significance. Holy Land, but nothing of any serious significance. A total disaster, a total fiasco, and in the words of one Greek chronicle of the time, absolutely shameful. The Fifth Crusade. Early 13th century, Pope Innocent III, great reforming pope, a great legalist, a great believer in the spiritual supremacy and the political supremacy of the Roman Church, decided that the Fourth Crusade simply wouldn't do. And the fact that they'd gone and burned Constantinople really wasn't very becoming of the Latins, people of the Roman Church. of the Latins, people of the Roman church. So organized, although he didn't live to see it completed, a great crusade that would weaken the sultans of Egypt who were controlling Jerusalem by attacking them in their own backyard. So the Fifth Crusade took aim at the city of Damietta in the Nile Delta.

Extraordinary accounts of the siege of Damietta, which went on for months and months and months. Eventually, Damietta was taken by the Crusaders. They sat in Damietta for a bit and then decided to march on Cairo, march up the Nile to Cairo. Absolutely dreadful decision to take because they didn't know anything about the Nile, didn't understand how it flooded, they didn't understand how it was controlled. And the sultan of the time, al-Kamil, allowed the crusaders to march up the Nile. And as soon as they got so far, they couldn't turn back, opened all the sluice gates and canals that controlled the flow of water out of the Nile into fields, controlled the flow of water out of the Nile into fields, flooded all the land around,

and then left the crusaders either to drown or beg for his assistance in leaving. Kicked them out of Damietta, and once again, just as with the Fourth Crusade, a major expedition of the church had ended in very little other than waste, death, and embarrassment, I suppose. That was the Fifth Crusade. Now, after the Fifth Crusade, the numbers get a little bit sticky because some time had elapsed since Jerusalem had been lost,

a couple of generations. The examples of the Fourth and Fifth Crusades were sufficient to illustrate the grievous difficulty of the ambition of retaking Jerusalem. And so you really see throughout the 13th century, crusading start to fragment. Now, much of that is down to Innocent III himself, who throughout his papacy at the beginning of the 13th century, made it his business to really expand the institution of the crusth century made it his business to really expand the institution of the crusade so instead of just saying like crusading is for uh for going and taking aim at jerusalem and lands close by and to sanctify fighting in spain and portugal

innocent um gave his permission for an escalation in fighting against the pagans in the Baltic. Innocent declared that wars against Cathar heretics in southern France, which were really being fought to increase the power of the French crown over southern French lords who had traditionally been independent. Innocent declared that that was a crusade. There were crusades. I mean, I think maybe the course of his papacy, Innocent preached seven or eight crusades i mean i think maybe the course was papacy innocent preached seven or eight crusades um not one of which actually went anywhere near jerusalem i mean unless you count the fifth ending up in alexandria in damietta i'm sorry um by the the end of innocence papacy therefore uh crusading had been extended, but it had also been weakened somewhat, it had been diffused. And during the 13th century, that process continued apace. So there was diminishing support for the crusader states of the East. The defence of those was left up to military orders like the Templars, the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights.

orders like the Templars, the Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights. Crusading was much easier to do closer to home and Popes were starting to use crusade just as a weapon against enemies wherever they could be found, frequently Christian enemies. So the most ridiculous example of this that you see is the wars between the Papacy and the Hohenstaufen, the German emperors and particularly the great Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the German emperors, and particularly the great Holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who was supposed to go on the Fifth Crusade, made lots of excuses and didn't, eventually turned up in the Holy Land in 1229, and through his friendship with the Sultan al-Kamil and his great understanding of Islamic culture, thanks to his upbringing on Sicily, negotiated a peace by which Jerusalem

was mostly returned to Christian rule for nearly 15 years. However, because Frederick Hohenstaufen had fallen out with successive popes, he did this while excommunicated from the church. So I like to say that had Frederick Hohenstaff been alive today and brought about the sort of peace he did in the Middle East, they would have given him the Nobel Peace Prize. But in the Middle Ages, just because of his friendship with sultans and his antipathy

with popes, they excommunicated him four times and eventually drove him to his death. They excommunicated him four times and eventually drove him to his death. And I notice your book goes up until the 15th century. Why do you extend that far forward? Is it because you look behind some of the impulses, for example, the Portuguese, they start creeping down the coast of Africa. They are influenced by crusading ideology. Well, some histories, quite a lot of histories of crusading finish the story in 1291. 1291, Acre, the capital city of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, was lost to the Mamluks, slave soldier caste, Turkic by origin, but who'd risen up to take political control in Egypt and Syria.

They swept the crusader states effectively into the sea and the Kingdom of Jerusalem became a sort of rump state in exile on the island of Cyprus. In retrospect it's clear that the crusader states were never revived in any meaningful form and that Jerusalem was long lost. Now people didn't have the benefit of hindsight of course at the time so I think there's certainly good reasons to continue the story of crusading past the loss of Acre in 1291 into the early 14th century when grand plans by people like Marina Senudo of Venice were being drawn up for a big new crusade on the scale of the first, second, third crusades. The wars of the Reconquista were continuing and continued all the way up till 1492 when the last Muslim ruler of Granada was handed over the keys to the Alhambra to the Catholic

monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. There are continuing wars right into the 15th century. The Teutonic Knights are still fighting pagans. Henry Bolingbroke, future Henry IV of England, went fighting a couple of seasons with the Teutonic Knights when he was a young man. Crusades were being declared willy-nilly. John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke's father, when he was fighting down in Castile and Portugal, at his war against other Christian kings, declared a crusade. So I think I'm writing about crusaders and there is absolutely no question that in the 15th century, there were tons of people who considered themselves crusaders. Indeed, well into the 16th century, you know, Christians fighting against the Ottomans

in Eastern Europe and, you know, towards the age of the Ottoman Empire, they considered themselves crusaders. 1798, you could take the story up to if you wanted, with Napoleon Bonaparte stopping in Malta and getting rid of the last vestiges of the hospitalers, a crusading military order. We can take the story as far as we want. I finished Crusaders, the book, in 1492, because I think this moment of the end of the Reconquista

is very important. It's important partly because the last rule of a significant Islamic power on mainland Europe is extinguished, but also because there's the rather neat fact that in the crowd watching the Alhambra being surrendered on the 1st of January, 1492, is a young man called Christopher Columbus. And Columbus then sets out across the Atlantic. And we know the story of Columbus's encounters with the new world very well.

But Columbus comes back, you know, writing these wide-eyed letters saying, you'll never guess what I've just found over there there's a whole bunch of other non-christian people who we can convert or kill and a load of their stuff that we can plunder and so it seems to me that all of these essential energies that had gone into crusading throughout the earlier or throughout the middle ages were now transferred if you like, westwards. And all of that sort of militant Christian acquisitiveness went across the Atlantic instead of towards Jerusalem.

Do the Crusades matter more today in the West, the memory of them or the myths about them, or in the East, in the Islamic world? There are profoundly different approaches to thinking about the Crusades between this Western Christian world, I think, and the modern Islamic world. We overuse the word crusade massively in the West today. I think we have a very elevated and absurdly elevated view at times as to how important the Crusades were to the rest of the world, clearly very important to the culture of medieval Europe and the politics and military events in Western Europe.

However, if you look at it from an Eastern perspective, from an Islamic perspective, there was a lot more going on during the Middle Ages than the Franks occasionally turning up and sort of biting you like a sort of annoying gnat. I mean, the size of the Crusader States within the broader Islamic world was absolutely tiny. And the arrival of sort of major crusades,

very sporadic, once every couple of generations for the large part. The net legacy of crusading was relatively slight. I mean, if you go to Jerusalemusalem even today you still won't see a great deal i mean you'll see there are crusader castles in israel and syria of course great castles like crafter chevalier and the ruins of chateau peleron or whatever but really the legacy is not profound in the Islamic world, with maybe one exception, which is to say that it's very easily weaponized and is very readily weaponized today by groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, because it has enormous propaganda value as a historical event that appears to show permanent division between the Western Christian world and the Eastern Islamic world. And it appears to show a sort of historical continuum

that can be mapped onto the world today. That's stupid propaganda, obviously. The real story, if you actually look at it, of relations between the Islamic world and the Western Christian world during the Middle Ages is the boring stuff of people living and surviving side by side and trading with one another and generally getting on okay and exchanging knowledge and skills and people.

We don't like to concentrate on that because it's not stuff of rollicking great battles and dramatic events. I think it's also important to say that during the Middle Ages, the Islamic world was much more riven by sectarian divides between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Turk, just as today, you know, the rivalries between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shia, are equally, if not more significant than relations between Islam and the West. So we can overrate the importance of the Crusades. But that said, given that crusading is such catnip to the alt-right, such catnip to Islamist terrorists, it clearly hasn't gone away. And as long as there are people who consider themselves crusaders, then this story is going to be in our lives.

Dan Jones, thank you very much. I feel we 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. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference

for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Some things just take too long. A meeting that could have been an email, someone explaining crypto, or switching mobile providers. Except with Fizz. Switching to Fizz is quick and easy. Mobile plans start at $17 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at phys.ca