Empire: World History - 295. Crusader Gaza: Saladin & Richard The Lionheart (Part 5)

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

Why did Crusaders travel from Western Europe to Gaza and The Levant in the 11th century? Who was Saladin and how did he conquer the Franks? How did the Mamluks defeat the Mongols in the 1200s and usher in an era of prosperity for Gaza? Anita and William are joined by Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, to discuss the epic era of the Crusades in Gaza, and the lesser-known but incredibly impactful Mamluk dynasty that followed. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. And we continue our series on Gaza. With this episode, we're going to be talking about the cruxia. Christian conquests of the Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. And our very special guest

is Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of the magnificent, the life and legend of the Sultan Saladin. Welcome to Empire. We're so happy to have you. Thank you. Thank you very much for asking me. Now, there's something with the Crusades, and I can attest to this, where people think they know all about it because it is covered at school. I mean, I can't tell you last year, I made a shield for a And then nine-year-old. Yeah, I don't know how that helped him imbibed the entire history of the region, but hot glue was involved.

So I feel like I'm sort of part of this story now, Jonathan. You're rather good at that kind of thing, aren't you? You're very good at sort of making. I've seen your house full of sort of top flight shields and sort of industrial revolution factories and all sorts of stuff. We're big believers in, well, I mean, I am. People are quite like doing it with them. I think they've lost interest, but I'm thrilled when they have a moment. make and do project. I also studied Crusades at school, and I remember it was the thing that

first directed me to the Middle East. And in fact, I walked when I was 20 in the footsteps of the first crusade, followed the route of Robert Kurtos, through France, down Italy, into Greece, through Turkey, down through Syria. It was the most wonderful trip. Yeah, but I did hot glue. So what are you trying to prove here? I mean, what I really want to know is from Jonathan Phillips. What was it, What was it the first piqued your interest, Jonathan? My maternal grandfather actually was a cartographer, and he was in the Middle East during the war. He used to be walking the countryside, Mount Hermann, mapping it. Like Lawrence of Arabia at the first World War.

Well, being around the campfire with the Bedouin and how kind they were to him, looking after him as he walked the hillsides. And that really struck a chord with me. It remained in my head as this probably very romantic view of the region. I had exactly the same, in fact, John, I remember when I arrived in Syria, on my first trip to Syria, walking the reach of the Crusades. I think I was there for three weeks, and I spent two nights only in a hotel.

Every other night people took me in, just a pre-modern world, which makes me all the more guilty when you think of how badly the Syrians have been treated as they travel through the West. I also read a great children's novel called Night Crusader by Ronald Welch, very much of its time. Yes, absolutely, yes. Totally. I could recount the whole thing to you now,

which I'm sure you don't want it here, but that again really was vivid in bringing out or suggesting to me what the place was going to look like. Well, look, let's go from, you know, the inspiration to where we are in this storyline. Because in our previous episode, we were talking about Islam in Gaza. So the Arab Muslims had conquered Gaza, the surrounding area, in the year 638. And they'd taken over control from the Christian byzantines who'd ruled over it. They'd built the dome of the rock and the Alaksa Mosque in nearby Jerusalem, both sites of pilgrimage for Muslims. And as Peter Cyrus was telling us in the last episode, this was not a massive revolution that some might imagine.

Because Palestinians remain majority Christian for at least 600 years. There wasn't that kind of wholesale transfer, a population that you sometimes see when a new power imposes its control over a region. But there certainly was a military elite. that was present. And we talked about the Mayads, the first great dynasty of Islam, ruling that rapidly expanding empire that goes all the way from the Indus to Spain. And then we talked about the Abbasids, who replaced them, running their empire from Baghdad. And so Jonathan, bring us up to speed. What's going on in Palestine just before the eruption of the Crusades? Who's in charge? And give us dates, if you would, so we know where on the timeline we've traveled to.

Yeah, the First Crusade is launched in 1095, so just three decades. after 1066, the Norman conquest of England, which is the obvious kind of thing for people to kind of base their ideas around. But the late 1090s in the region, in the Muslim Levant, is a time of great turmoil. In the decades before, you've had strong, powerful rulers in Seljuk, Turkey, the Seljuk Empires. These were Turkic steppe people who came in from Central Asia and have established a real power base across the region. You've also got the Fatimid Empire in Egypt. So these two big instigues, Institutions are there. Tell us about the Fatimids, because they're Shia, aren't they? They're different from most of the rest of the Muslims in the Middle East. Yeah, you have the basic Sunni Shia split within Islam. And within Egypt, in the 9th, 10th centuries, this Shiite group, this dynasty, the Fatimids named after Fatima, the Prophet's daughter, set themselves up and become a very wealthy, powerful institution through the 10th and into the 11th centuries. But just before the First Crusade turns up, there's a The poet gives this lovely line, 1093 is the year of the death of caliphs and commanders. That's very nice. It's a great line. Powerful Seljuk rulers and they all die in the same year or two.

So you've had powerful leadership and then suddenly it all breaks down. When you've had people in power for a long time, there's often quite a lot of turmoil afterwards. And the Crusaders are very fortunate. It's not deliberate, but it's just their good luck that they turn up at a time when the Muslim nearest is very divided. Jonathan, tell us a little about Pope Urban II who launches the first grade, because this is an extraordinary movement,

gathering troops from all over Europe, every class of people from the great nobleman and the kings, down to ordinary peasants with their staffs, all kind of heading off. It sounds incredibly improbable. What inspired him to call it, and how did he pull it off? It is improbable. Actually, kings are the only people who don't go, strangely.

Princes, Robert Kurt Holmes, But not kings. Don't argue with our expert. Back up, Dower and Paul. Right. As you were, Jonathan. I'm not going to be invited back, am I? The point is that the church in Western Europe is undergoing a sort of a reformation, the papal reform movement, we call it, trying to purify itself. But also the importance of Jerusalem is something that's a great part of religious life at the time. And there's a sense also Christianity pushing back against Muslims in Spain. in Sicily. There's an appeal from the Greeks, which also is part of this. It's an effort to recover Christendom's most holy place. And I think that is the drive. The Pope wants to show leadership. He really wants to establish himself as the leader of the flock. And this is coming at a time when

Europe is sort of growing and stronger. The economy is beginning to get going and merchant fleets in the Italian city-states and this sort of thing. It's a good moment to plan a big military expedition. Yeah, it's just on the cusp of this kind of thing. I mean, Europe is still, you know, The great kingdoms haven't really emerged yet. It's very sort of localized in many respects. And yes, the First Crusaders is an extraordinary idea, the idea of gathering knights and nobles and taking back Jerusalem, thousands of miles away.

So that's what's going on on Pope Urban side. But what is it that he is peddling to get all these people to down tools, step out of their real lives, and sign up for this battle for his God? That's a really interesting question. I mean, you know, you're asking people to go two and a half thousand miles, leave your home, your family, your loved ones, going absolutely into the unknown in most cases. It's got to be pretty powerful. What's drawing you there? It's a mixture of things. I mean, nobody ever does anything for one single reason. And he is offering them a spiritual reward. Medieval people are terrified of the consequences of sin. You as a knight and noble, you've been sinning your whole life, greed, envy, lust, killing. And Urban II says, well, if you reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom, I will give you a remission of all your sins, a sort of get out of hell free card. If you complete this pilgrimage, which it is, of course, to the ultimate place of pilgrimage, Christ's tomb, you will deserve, you will merit a spiritual reward. And this is one of the things that draws people to this, the idea that they will escape the torments of hell.

There's that sort of carrot. But I mean, is there also sort of propaganda about what is happening to pilgrims who have tried to go before? Because the kind of picture that Peter Cyrus painted was, you know, you had a transfer of power, but religions rocked along together. Even so. And he told us about, you know, majority Christian areas as well. And I know we're sort of focused in this series about Gaza, but let's look at Jerusalem in these places, which is the Holy Land, which is the place that is important to Jews, Muslims and Christians. what is he saying to people about any question who wants to go and make a pilgrimage

before he feels the need to go in with an army? It's a push and a pull thing. They are also very much peddling what we would simply call propaganda. He's saying the Muslims are killing Christians, they're killing pilgrims, they're torturing them, they're tying them to posts and pulling their stomachs out. There is an awful lot of propaganda. As in any war, you demonize your enemy, and there's a lot of that going on. And how much truth is there in it, Jonathan?

Is there these kind of horrors happening? Very little, very little truth to it. It is simply a way of motivating people to want to be aggressive towards others. It's a way of driving them towards the Holy Land and recovering Jerusalem. I'm always sort of struck by crusaders come from all across Western Europe. If you come from, say, Flanders or Northern Europe, you won't have met a Muslim. You know, that's simply going to be beyond your experience. But people from the trading cities like sort of Genoa and Pisa and things like that,

they've got bases in Egypt and Jaffa. They're going to be much more familiar with Muslims and traders. So that kind of contradiction and complexity is part of the picture. And what's also quite interesting is that urban gets very graphic and sort of rebels in the descriptions of disembalments and the way in which entrails are dragged out of people. I mean, that's part of the schick, isn't it? I mean, yes, as I said, This is propaganda. Some of it's obviously written with the benefit of hindsight. We don't have his

sort of speech from the councillor Claremont, but we do have letters that he wrote in which he's encouraging people to recover Christ's city. There's also other reasons why people go on the crusade. Nobles and knights want honour and prestige. They want to be the great man who gets over the walls first. People want some economic advantage, perhaps. The idea of the landless younger sons, that's one of the great cliches of the crusades. It's all these landless younger. sons looking for adventure and things like that doesn't really work, not least because fathers, uncles, brothers all go. It's not just landless younger sons, but also most people come home. That's the obvious turnaround. About 90% of the Crusaders, once they've got Jerusalem

back, assuming they haven't died along the way, we'd just go, we'd like to get home to our homes and families and loved ones. So it's a tiny proportion who want to settle and stay. But they do found what we then call the Crusader states. So Jonathan, just very quickly, they leave Western Europe, they trudge across the Balkans, they're ferried past Constantinople, they fight battles in Anatolia, and finally, they get to Jerusalem and they actually take it. Now, give us a picture of Jerusalem and Gaza and that world of Palestine just before the Crusaders get there, and what do they do to it? It's, again, Jerusalem and Gaza is interesting. It's this effectively a frontier region between the Sunni Seljuk Turks who are ruling what we might say as Syria and the Shiite Fatimids in Egypt. And control of Jerusalem itself changes two or three times in the months before the crusade turns up. So it really is, if you're a sort of farmer in the field, you end up having three different rulers in the space of about 16 months. It's that level of turmoil and frontier society. And of course, when our armies go through regions, they cause chaos.

Tell us about that farmer in the field. Who are the farmers in the fields who have to face these Westerners suddenly turning up with their crosses all over their shields and all the rest of it? The rural population, I mean, there's a limit about what we know about these people. Some of them are going to be Muslims. Some of they're going to be Eastern Christians. They just have to adapt to whoever is basically in control. Obviously they live in sort of villages. There's areas that are very much Eastern Christian.

and there's very much areas that are Muslim. So you find a very sort of polyglot society down there, and that again is one of the fascinating things about this whole region. So after the First Crusade, which starts in 1095 and gets to Jerusalem, I think 1099, you have the foundation of something called the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. And this is this expat state. Suddenly you've got all these guys who start off in Western Europe ruling. It's Europe's first sort of medieval colony.

As Jonathan said, a lot of the guys go back to France and to England and to Flanders, but a small minority stay on. There's a whole succession of different crusades and the whole succession of different rulers of the kingdom. And we're going to focus in on the period just before and leading up to the Third Crusade, which is one of the most famous ones when you've got these very sort of celebrated characters like Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, who Jonathan's written his book about. So tell us about King Baldwin, the Third. And where does he come into the story?

Alderman III at the time of the crusader, the Frankish capture of Gaza, is a young man. He's about 19 years old. And he's co-ruler with his mother, Queen Mellisand. He came to the throne as a youth and she's his regent. But interestingly, she rather enjoys being ruler. She's very good at it. And so she maintains control. Anita's smiling beautifully at this moment.

Melisand is an incredibly interesting, powerful. figure, who's already effectively shaken off a challenge to her authority from her late husband. And she's good at ruling. But Baldwin, as a young man, 19, wants to begin to assert himself. The Second Crusade, a major expedition from Western Europe, came over in 1148. It was a complete failure. So there's a need to try and reset and boost morale a bit. So in 1149, he decides that Gaza is somewhere that he'd like to capture. Which brings us to the Knight's Templar, who again very much appeared in your children's book and my children's teleprogram, and more recently, are sort of Dan Brown and fodder with the sort of secrets of the Templars and all the rest of it. Give us a portrait of who these guys actually are. The Knights Templar are a religious group. They're warrior monks. They are sworn to fight Islam. But they live in an institution. They take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They are absolutely that blend of warrior and monk.

very popular idea, they're very wealthy, but also in a sense they're a standing army. Those sort of things don't exist in medieval times. These guys live in barracks, they train, they've got a lot of resource. So if you want to give somewhere that is a difficult frontier region, i.e. Gaza, give a castle to a group that's appropriate, they're the people you'd pick. And just to join dots here, if you've ever been through London, Temple Station you might have stopped on, on the district line, is named because of the Knights Templar. Well, even, the Temple Church is very much the example of that in London. That's a round building that was consecrated in 1185, was their headquarters in London, and is meant to replicate the Holy Sepulchre.

So they have brought Jerusalem to London. It's a real statement of what their job description is, if you see what I mean. So King Baldwin, with his youthful ambition and overbearing mother and wanting to make his mark on the world, they're still telling me what to do. And then turns around and says, you know what, these knights Templar, they're quite handy. I could use them to stamp my mark on this land. So how does he do that? Well, once he's captured Gaza, he is then able to, three or four years later, they capture Ascalon. So in other words, the Crusader control of the coastline is complete. And that allows them really to establish themselves much, much more firmly.

And Gaza is really the southern border, if you want to put it like that. In every episode we've done that, it's the same thing, that Gaza is the last place, the last fertile place, before the waste of the Negev and the Sinai. And it's the obvious frontiers. Everyone always, whether they're coming north to conquer Palestine or whether they're going south to try and keep an eye on Egypt or conquer it, they need to hold Gaza and Ascalon as the port beside it. Once the Franks have captured Ascalon in 1153, their control of the coast is really, really strong. and Gaza just south of Ascalon is very much the frontier city castle. You've got the Templars guarding it. And also, now that you've got that security of the coastline, you can develop Gaza. And so, for example, a major church is constructed there. It's about 40 metres long.

If you're building a church of that scale, you're investing in a region. The Franks, the Crusaders, look as if they are there to stay and they really want to start bringing the place forwards. We should say that the church is still there or was until this year. And there are these wonderful photographs of these very sort of gothic-looking arches. I saw in this wonderful exhibition on Gaza in Paris that I saw recently beautiful 1920s photographs of sort of French Franciscans in all their kit standing in front of these crusader arches. Jonathan, with the Templars, as you say, guarding Gaza and more or less having taken over the coastline and being very much in charge, what is their behavior towards non-Christians?

I mean, would it have been a beneficent rule by these conquering crusaders? Or what would it have been like for the people living there? If you're living in lands that are ruled by the Frankish kings, they have a choice to make when they conquer those territories. You can either, in the initial burst of conquest, yes, there's a lot of massacres, 1099, 1100, 1101. But once you settle those lands, you've got a choice. You could carry on trying to do that,

or you can try and work with the people in your land. You need a tax base, you need people to farm the land, and you find that, in fact, the Muslims and the Eastern Christians under the control of the Frankish rulers do seem to have a reasonably comfortable, maybe be the wrong word, but they're not being persecuted, simply because in some ways the Crusaders and the Franks are yet another landlord in this region. Also, it should be said that even if you have people who want the machine to keep rolling, you might feel a sense of, of a grievance against these people because they've come in and they're running what was once your land. And that certainly feels like the ground, the fertile ground in which you find the roots of Saladin. Now that again is a name that anyone who's read anything about the Crusades will know. Tell us the origin story of this man Saladin. Saladin, as you say, is one of the most famous figures of medieval history. He's occurred ethnically and he grew up in, largely grew up

in the great city of Damascus, in a climate in which the counter crusade, the jihad was beginning to take shape under his great patron man called Nour al-Din. So he is beginning to understand the potential of the jihad linked with the military might of Damascus and Aleppo to take on the crusaders and to recover Jerusalem for Islam. So Saladin is growing up in that climate, which hasn't really been there at the time of the First Crusade. It's emerged in the course of the 12th century, a sort of a focus to drive the Franks out. But there's other things about Saladin, in a sense of why he succeeds and why he's able to be so effective. And part of that is that he is an ambitious man. His dynasty called the Ayubids, he wants to set up an empire for them. And the base in

which he does it, there's a competition to take control of Egypt in the 1160s. And Saladin, at the head, effectively soon afterwards at the head of an army, is able to make a base for his Ayubid dynasty. So I see him very much as a pious holy warrior and an empire builder. My great hero, Stephen Rumsman, we need to bring in here. He calls him a chivalrous yet formidable adversary who earned the respect and sometimes the admiration of his enemies for his strategic brilliance, his reputation for mercy, fairness in negotiations, his generosity towards captives, and his skillful leadership in defending Muslim lands. We've always seen him as this rather chivalrous figure who always represents the best of the Islamic adversaries of the Crusaders.

Is he that wonderful figure that is romanticized in novels and movies? I think there's a bit of Walter Scott in what you were sort of channeling through Rundsenman there. I mean, the things that you said there are largely correct, but there's a lot more to him than that. And I would emphasize this driving ambition to build an empire. He ends up rebelling against his patron, Neuraldeen. it to be a civil war. Niroldin dies in 1174 and Saladin spends the next 13 years fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims. That's not quite in the romantic image or the hero of Islam. And he's doing it so he can consolidate his power base in Egypt and then Damascus, Aleppo and Muzul. And once he's

got all those things together, he's able then to take on the crusaders. And just to clarify, we were talking about how Egypt had been ruled by the Shia Fatimids. Has Saladin overthrown these guys? Yes, Nur al-Din and Saladin's troops from Syria had invaded, and the Crusaders from Jerusalem had invaded, and they both are fighting to try to get hold of Egypt. Saladin's group wins. The Fatimids are effectively his prisoners,

and after a couple of years, the young Fatimid Caliph, aged about 21, dies of natural causes, I'm sure you understand, and that's the end of his dynasty. So Saladin there, as effectively being the leading warrior of Sunni Islam in the conflict with the Shiites, is able to pose as a hero of Sunni Islam in that respect. So having consolidated his forces, having sort of felt now he has the strength. He turns his attention to the Crusaders. Now, the year is 1170.

What is the first clash with the Crusaders like and where does it take place? Yeah, he's trying to show as well as he's sort of, feathering his own nest in Egypt that he wants to take on the Christians. He wants to take on the Franks. And so he gathers a very big army and pushes up in towards Gaza. There's a fight at a place called Darum, or nearly a battle near Darum, which is just south of Gaza. That's Dar al-Bala in the modern map, and we've been hearing it on our news bulletins lately. He goes past Darham, where the King of Jerusalem was come down carrying the true cross, the great talisman of the Crusader armies, believed to be the cross upon which Christ was crucified.

They're that worried by Saladin's incursion. But they don't end up fighting, and Saladin gets to Gaza itself, which is defended moderately well. He breaks into the edge of the city, where curiously, the noble in charge of it won't let the local inhabitants into the citadel, which seems a bit harsh. I think he thinks it'll encourage them to fight a bit more strongly.

But Saladin's got a strong force and kills a lot of the Christian defenders, takes their property and their cattle and withdraws. Garza is hit by a heavy raid in 1170, but it's not anywhere like a conquest. And then we have the famous great battles of the horns of Hatton, which again was something I remember learning about in my school crusades lessons. The Horns of Hattin 1187, which is this crucial turning point. Yeah, this is Saladin's huge bid.

He spent all this time fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims, he's saying, you know, you've got to back me, you've got to join me, we are going to recover Jerusalem for Islam. He's pulled together Egypt, Damascus, Aleppo, Muzul, and he has to fight. And he sets a trap for the Crusaders by taking the town of Tiberius and saying that you have to rest the lady of Tiberius. And he exploits their divisions. And they try and march about 32 kilometers across a blazingly hot, waterless plateau. And he has the army and the resources to defeat them. He captures the King of Jerusalem and the True Cross. and absolutely decimates the Crusader army.

And I remember this image of the horns of Hatton when it's blazing hot day, the Crusaders have no water, they're on the top of the hill, he's surrounded them, they're thirsty. He starts bushfires, is that all true? Yeah, I mean, he's got so much water. His men can pour out buckets of water in front of the Crusaders, just to show that we've got it and you haven't. That's a proper mind game, that one, isn't it?

It is, and also music and drumming, and trumpets, it's all part of creating the pressure on your opponents. And that, I mean, the reverberations from that, you know, the drums and the music, they will inevitably reach the places that have sent their sons to fight in Crusades previously. And they also then sort of carry Richard the Lionheart. Now, we can bring Richard the Lionheart in here because that terror of Saladin taking the Holy Lands is really what becomes this wave that lifts Richard, the King of England, up to a new height. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, after the Battle of Hatteen,

Jerusalem is open to Saladin, and a couple of months later, he recovers it for Islam, and he's able to tell everybody, well, you know, you thought I was doing this for myself? No, I've got God's judgment on this. I have recovered the Holy City. So he's very good. One of Saladin's great secrets is propaganda. He's brilliant at churning out propaganda. And so he obviously exploits this. But the Pope in Europe has a heart attack when he hears of this. He's driven an absolute sort of stake through the heart of Christendom. And the response inevitably will be immense. And it's the Third Crusade where the great rulers of England, France, Germany, all the nobles come out to try to recover Jerusalem. Can you just tell us? What was he like,

Richard the Lionheart? Because never as a man been so variously portrayed. I mean, just, you know, who was he? Who was this guy? He's the son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquit. He's a complex character. He's incredibly thin-skinned. I think he's brutal. He's vain. He's also a very cautious strategist. He's also somebody who is a good diplomat. He's a very contradictory character in many respects. He is a great warrior. If you get near him in battle, you're going to be in deep, deep trouble. He's totally lethal. But he doesn't fight battles for the hell of it. He does it when he's pushed into battles. He's good at logistics and things like that. There's more to him than a sort great big thug with a double-handed sword. My great Stephen Rundsenman, who I learned all my

crusading history from, he calls him a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier. Again, a bit of Walter Scotty. Yeah, very much, very much. I'm not sure Richard is gallant. He is very, very pragmatic. He's very brutal. times. He massacres people, doesn't it, hideous moments in Aker? The great sort of set piece of the Third Crusade is the siege of Aker, which is a city, now Aco, in northern Israel, and it's been going on for years. Saladin's been trying to break this siege. Richard turns up, and he is an incredibly effective warrior, and within a few weeks it's broken. And he has two and a half thousand Muslim prisoners. Saladin is basically mucking him around about paying the ransom and trying to sort of spin

the timeout. And Richard massacres them, a straight down the line, war crime that horrifies everybody at the time and is something I think still remembered today. But that is the very harsh, harsh, pragmatic side of Richard the Lionheart. Well, I mean, that kind of massacre is going to, again, cause terror in the region. And it is also sort of giving Richard the kind of swagger where he can take whatever he wants. He turns his attention in 1191. to Gaza. Now, it is a fortified city. I mean, Saladin has taken it, but he's re-fortified this place. How vulnerable is it at the time when Richard puts it in his side? What Richard is doing, he's looking to march down the coast and then go inland to Jerusalem.

And Saladin is worried as to what Richard's next move is going to be. And so he doesn't really want him to consolidate the coastline. Saladin's really torn about this. Ascalon and Garza have to be dismantled and destroyed. And that really is something painful to him to break these places down. You might say to his credit, he goes there himself in person to oversee this. And obviously, the people are devastated. You know, you're breaking down our places. You're making us move out. He could have sent down, I suppose, a lieutenant or somebody to do it. But he, in a sense, again, one of his skills is with people. He actually supervises this sad moment himself. And do we get any actual meeting between Saladin and Richard Llanhart?

There are these two sort of archetypal figures, the ultimate crusader and the ultimate anti-crusader. And again, in the kind of Walter Scott version of things, they're both these very chivalrous figures. But they never actually meet, do they? No, sadly not. I mean, much to the upset of television producers and dramatists everywhere. The person who Richard spends a lot of time with is Saffodin, Saladin's brother. And I think a lot of the reputation of Saladin in the West is in part through Safedin. Because Richard is a great diplomat as well as a great warrior.

And to try to end the crusade, he has multiple meetings with Safedin, and they find they both like music, they like poetry, they like hunting, they like food. And people are like, hang on, you two are getting on a bit too well here. You're a bit cozy. Yeah. And so in a sense, that is all part of the diplomatic game. I mean, of course, you're trying to work out how strong the other guy is as well. or the other side is. But Richard and Saladin never met. Saladin said he would not meet somebody

unless they'd made a full and formal peace agreement because he didn't want to meet somebody he would then go on and fight afterwards. So Safedin is doing this with Saladin's blessing, is he? So it's just he can't bear to be in the same room, but his brother, who has a sweeter tongue than him, can do this for him. Yeah, effectively. But Safedin is very much empowered to do all the talking. What language are they using? Are they got translators? Yeah, there's a whole industry of interpreters. Some of the Frankish nobles who've grown up in the Crusader states do speak fluent Arabic. Some of them are known to Saladin anyway.

One of them, he had long arguments about Hadith, the sayings of the prophet with. So there is a cultural linking there. And Poro Gaza, as ever, is going backwards and forwards between these different powers. We've already seen an exchange hands, I think, three times already. What happens to it next? Well, after the end of the crusade, it remains in Muslim hands. And it remains in the hands of the Ayubids, Saladin's dynasty. And then, I suppose, relatively, you've got a few decades of peace. Saladin appoints an administrator. The Christian church is changed into a mosque. It becomes the great mosque. The population will probably start changing a little bit. And the start of the 13th century is a more peaceful phase. But then, when you get to the 1240s, 1250s, 1260s, it becomes a war zone again. This idea of being the frontier region really, really kicks in. Let's take a break there. Join us after the break where after just having a pocket of peace,

Gaza is once again plunged into war. Welcome back. So Jonathan left us with this brief and unusual peaceful period when there isn't a war going on in Gaza. But by the 1250s, the Ayurid Sultanate founded by Saladin is overthrown by a new group. And these are very important guys who we're going to hear a lot more of in this half. This is the Mamluks, liberated slaves, often of central Asian origin, often raising the flag of jihad against the last bastions of the crusaders. And particularly, there's this character, Sultan Baibars, so ugly that allegedly one owner sent him back for his ugliness to the slave market. Tell us about all this lot, Jonathan. The idea of Mamluk's slave soldiers has been around for a couple of centuries by this time.

They're mainly Kipchak Turks from around sort of southern Russia, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and they're captured and they're brought and they're used as warriors. They're trained, in a sense, their loyalty becomes to their unit. They're often converted to Islam if they're not Muslims. And they become really good soldiers. They're great warriors. They're good horsemen. They're good horse archers.

They're good siege engineers. So as a sort of a tier of warriors, they're quite effective. There's one particular group of them, a regiment that the Ayubids generate called the Baharia. They have a barracks on the River Nile. And they become, if you like, an elite. And it's out of that elite. When Saladin's dynasty, the Ayubids start to fail, that the Baharia emerge and start to take over control of Egypt. And as you say, the most prominent or the most famous amongst these is the formidable, deceitful, brutal Sultan Bibybars.

You said they raised the flag of jihad. Is that because they're critical of Saladin's family for not being Muslim enough? I mean, what is their reason to turn on a fellow Muslim who has been in charge? I'm not sure they're turning on him for his religiosity. This is just simply a battle. Saladin's dynasty has sort of started fighting amongst itself and has really run out of steam. And they just see an opportunity to take power for themselves. And they squabble amongst themselves for a bit.

But really, we now then sort of start thinking them as a dynasty. from really the reign of Baibas. So it's the 1260s now, and just when Palestine might be thinking that it's in for a bit of peace and quiet having got rid of the Crusaders, a new bunch turn up who are, of course, the Mongols. And as we know, the Mongols managed to smash their way through China, through Persia, they burn Baghdad, they create havoc and chaos.

And then, incredibly unexpectedly, it is the Mamlux who defeat them. Tell us about the Battle of the Battle of the Battle of, Ayn Jalud. Yeah, the Mongols have over the previous decades created the biggest land empire in the history of the world. And Syria is next on the stop. As you say, 1258, they took Baghdad, moving into northern Syria, and Egypt is there. They send out envoys to the Egyptian saying, you know, there's a divine mandate here. The world is ours. If you say no, you are, you are rebelling against God. And if you do that, you know, there's going to be trouble. And the Mamlux are just trying to establish themselves and, well, they could submit, I suppose. But they take a very brave,

all-or-nothing approach and they murder the Mongol envoys, which is pretty well putting your cards on the table there. It's a diplomatic message, isn't it really? If you cut envoys in half, it is sending a particular message out. That really then obviously is provoking a battle with the Mongols. They're quite fortunate. The great Mongol leader, Hulugu has had to go back to Mongolia to to help select a new Khan, and the General Kit Buker is left there. And so the Mamloks advance out past Gaza, which the Mongols briefly seem to have been certainly in control of at one point in 1260. So yet another rule, but really only a matter of weeks. They're very much sort of in the en the Enviro. And then there is a battle in 1260 in southern Galilee between the Mamloups and the

Mongols. They're both quite similar in a sense of the form of their armies, their horse archers. So they're quite sort of evenly matched, but the Mamluk's triumph. And ethnically not completely different. They're both sort of central Asian, people who are good with the bow and that kind of stuff. But with all of this going on, this violence in a pretty short period of time, again, focusing on Gaza, which we've talked about in previous episodes in this series, had a very proud mercantile trade place in the world. It was incredibly wealthy.

But with this much violence going on for this. this amount of time. What is it left with? What is it left like? I think particularly say the 1240s to the early 1260s, there's just armies passing by or located there for weeks on end. These Mongol armies or some of the Mamluk armies are very, very big. You've got tens of thousands of horses around the place. The land is going to be, I think, worked pretty hard. Because they have to feed them. So they're basically sort of garrison there. So you've got horses, horse manure, soldiers, that feeling of kind of being quite oppressed and then having to work the land till it sort of dies under your feet because you've got to feed them all. You've got to

feed them all. They're going to feed themselves. Yeah, they're going to take it from you. So I do sort of see it as being an incredibly difficult time, 1240s to 1260s. But with the victory Aynjulut, the Mamlux are, first of all, the Mongols have barely ever been defeated before. And this gives them a legitimacy. And Baibar's builds on that. pushes them north, and this begins to create some stability for Gaza. So how quickly does Gaza get back on its feet? Does it ever regain its past prosperity, would you say? I think the decades after that, Gaza does become prosperous. It becomes one of the three administrative centres of the Mamluk region, along with Safed and Damascus. It is prosperous.

There's money coming into it. There's military people coming into it, endowing mosques, endowing madrasas, there's inscriptions showing that there is wealth definitely arriving there. Yes, I mean, I think, you know, just like you and I were brought up on the Crusaders, and we watched these television programs and saw the films and read the books. None of us learn about Mamlux. They're completely absent for the Western curriculum. And yet, actually, on the ground, they are one of the greatest builders of this region. I've got on my bookshelves at home, this enormous two-volume hardback set of,

all the buildings they built in just Jerusalem. And it's two vast volumes with the whole sort of photo spread of about sort of 70 pages of these fountains and mosques and carabans rise and Sufi shrines. And the same sort of thing happens on a slightly less of a huge scale, but the same sort of thing happens in Gaza, doesn't it? You get the great mosque built in 1260. You can all sorts of stuff turning up at this period. Yes, it becomes a much more Islamic city. There are more Islamic religious buildings. You've got to imagine certainly a population increase as well. I mean, peace and not being a war zone is going to encourage people to arrive there. You've got Gaza no longer as the frontier region.

Peace is finally established with the Mongols in the early 14th century. And so this enables trade to flourish as well. I had a friend to dinner the other day, and he brought a book with a description of Gaza at this time of a bunch of European pilgrims turning up during the Mamluk period in Gaza with a very full description of it. And so much of the history of Gaza used to be just conflict. But at this point, we've actually got a really detailed snapshot. Oh, go on. Share with class.

I'm desperate to him when it was like, go on. This is a record left by a man called Friar Felix Fabri, who was a Swiss-born Dominican. And he came twice on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And this is a little bit later than Bybas. This is now the 1480s. The Mamluk are still in control. This is a long period of stability. Our traders has absolutely returned.

It's a prosperous port. And he describes the city as being surrounded. This is one of the great surprises because we're so used now to seeing these dreadful pictures of Gaza as this desert and destruction. But a lot of the medieval descriptions describe like this. And he says, surrounded by pleasant groves of fruit trees, almond, palms and figs, which so crowded thickly around Gaza is to make it like a city set in a wood. But with a peaceful sound of lapping waves in the distance, when all was quiet, we heard in our courtyard the noise and the raw.

of the sea. And he says it's unwalled. It's bigger than Jerusalem. You see, this is the surprise. We think of it as this sort of place of conflict. It's a really prosperous port. And he says its houses are made mostly of mud brick. It has some very fine mosques, exceptionally good public baths, while all provisions here were in such plenty and so low in price that the town had the nickname of the butter ditch. And the pilgrims were warmly received here and were able to wander around and never heard an ill word. While the governor granted all that we asked and treated us very kindly, although he was a heathen, says the friar.

And then there's this fascinating moment when the Mamluk army turns up. There's drums and there's cattle drums and suddenly these horses are coming up from the Sinai and heading on in. Everyone locks up their shots and hides because these guys are so predatory. A regiment of Mamluk soldiers turned up from Egypt

and announced by eight musicians banging cattle drums. Immediately the townsmen locked up their shop, they come and wherever they like they grab and take away without paying and there is no man that dare deny them the people ever kept their livestock in their houses horses, donkeys, sheeps and goats

because they would have been carried off by the silvery next day the man looks departed and Gaza came to life again and then they all go and have this wonderful time in the baths where they get massaged and there's this Ethiopian Massa who mens all their sort of sore bits and they have a lovely time so we have this sort of snapshot

of this very prosperous, very attractive town, but the locals don't seem to like their almost sort of colonial rulers. So you have sort of prosperity, sure, but you also have this collision of two major religions in the region, and you've had Christianity and Islam going at each other during the Crusades, also during the Mamluk period. What is happening to the Jewish population that we've talked about that has been also in this region for a very long time? Yes, there is certainly under the Mamluk's evidence of a Jewish population. I suspect they weren't there during the time of the Crusades. They're massacred by Crusaders, aren't they, in 1099? 1099, when the Crusaders break into Jerusalem,

the Muslim defenders and the Jewish population are massacred by the Crusaders, as you say. The Jews weren't allowed to live in the Holy City by the Crusaders. You do find them in some ports engaging in trade. When you get to the Mamluk era and the prosperity of Gaza is beginning to increase, You find Jewish families. We hear 60 Jewish families living in Gaza in the 14th century. They're engaged in trade. They're also in winemaking, which certainly pleases the pilgrims when they're moving through. So, yes, it's one of the other crops, vineyards that is able to be produced down there.

So again, this seems to be all part of the seeming prosperity of Gaza. And Sufis, there's a big Sufi brotherhood. Tell us about them, the Islamic Mystic Brotherhoods. Under the Mamluk, there is certainly a Muslim majority in the city of Gaza, and one indication, I suppose, of the level of religiosity, the level of Islamization that's coming on, as well as all the mosques that are being built, the presence of Sufi lodges, Sufi mystics, who are an important part of the Islamic faith, are being established there by some important religious thinkers. It's been really fascinating. And thank you very much, Jonathan, for walking us through this.

We leave Gaza now under Mamluk rule. It's flourishing, as Jonathan has said. But there is a powerful army on the horizon, the army of the Ottomans. And that's where we're going to go next time on Empire. If you want to unlock the full Empire Experience, then do join the Empire Club today at EmpirPoduk.com. That's EmpirPoduk.com. You get early access to main episodes, a weekly newsletter, an exclusive bonus episodes, including William. What's the next exciting bonus that we've got?

We've got the wonderful Selma Dabag talking about Palestinian literature. I think when we talk about Gaza, as in this episode, so much of it is the story of conflict. And we thought it was very important to talk about the literature scene in Palestine generally, but also specifically in Gaza, because I think unknown to most of us in the West, it is a major centre of poetry and fiction and writing today. So we're going to go in a slightly different direction in this bonus episode and talk to Selma about the writers of Gaza. But our thanks for now to Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Hardway College. It's an awfully huge expanse of time we've asked you to cover and you've done it so well for us.

Thank you so much. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnann. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.