Forbidden History - Vadum Jacob: Saladin’s Siege of the Crusader Frontier

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

At the siege of Vadum Jacob in 1179, Muslim forces overcame the Knights Templar. Forensic analysis of the battleground sheds light on this conquest. Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Ronnie Ellenblum: Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Gila Kahil: Doctor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Hadas Motro: Hebrew University of Jerusalem David Nicolle: Author and Military Historian Kate Raphael: Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tim Sutherland: Host Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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a Forbidden Historian to unlock brand new exclusive episodes, including the very first episode in our brand new Patreon series, Forbidden History Inner Circle. In this exclusive episode, we discuss the story of Nazis escaping to Egypt with me, your host, Eric Myers, joined by published author and historian Tony McMahon. Head over to our Patreon for much more exclusive Forbidden History content. Thanks for supporting the show. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the frontier of the Christian world, a clash of faiths, a clash of arms.

The place was taken and the people were dead. A race against time, a struggle for survival, the Holy Land, a Holy War. So they go down fighting and there is slaughter. An amazing story of conflict and of archaeology. Yeah, it was very hard to stay calm. The Knights Templar, Dust and Bones, the Crusaders of Vadum Jacob, the medieval world,

the 5th to the 15th century. In this episode of Forbidden History, archaeologist Tim Sutherland and a team of specialists try to understand medieval life by exploring the realm of the medieval dead. Vadim Jacob, or Jacobs Ford, lies on the Jordan River in northern Israel. The ruins today bind their secrets in silence.

But in medieval times, this was the frontier, not only between kingdoms, but also ideologies. Religions. It was the scene of a terrible clash in a long and bloody story of the wars between the Islamic and Christian worlds that dominated the Middle East throughout the medieval period. The Crusades.

The Crusades had their origin at the end of the 11th century. The westward migration of Muslim Seljuks led to Pope Urban II's call to recover the Christian East. Anyone who took up the cross would have their sins erased. A Holy War. The army of the First Crusade was 100,000 strong, mostly French and Norman knights, soldiers and peasants. They pillaged across Eastern Europe and into Palestine, finally besieging Jerusalem. In July 1099, the Holy City fell. The Crusaders massacred defenders and inhabitants alike, Muslim and Jewish, men, women and children.

The Temple Mount was said to be drenched in blood. The kingdom of Jerusalem was born. It is amazing. There's no other time like it in the medieval period. period. And it's also quite tragic. It's a war about religion. In 1179, the Kingdom of Jerusalem was around the same age as the modern state of Israel is today, approximately 80 years old. There was a delicate power balance across the frontier of the Jordan Valley. All that was to change though, when King Baldwin the 4th set in motion plans to build a new stronghold on his kingdom's frontier.

a fortress that could drastically alter the strategic status quo. The castle of Vadim Jacob was the result. Archaeologist Tim Sutherland of England's University of York has studied many medieval sites, but so far none relating to the Crusades. The history is amazing enough, but the archaeology is opening up a complete new dimension about what we know about the Crusades.

It's the first time Tim's been to Israel, walking in the footsteps of the European Crusaders who came here more than 800 years ago. Tim's heard about the amazing wealth of archaeology that the region has to offer, dating from the earliest prehistory and biblical times through to almost the present day. But there is so much archaeology from so many different periods. We're talking about biblical period, Byzantine period, all the way through the Romans to the modern day. and there's traces of all those cultures in every bit of it. Nowhere has more rich archaeological sites than the Golden City itself.

Jerusalem. Yeah, Jerusalem has an attraction unlike anywhere else, so it's difficult to sum up how impressive it is really. Also spiritually, rather than just, you know, it's not just another tourist site. This is like one of the holiest places on earth to a lot of people. You know, there are churches, there are mosques, there are sites that I've only ever read about books and seen pictures of. And so it's very humbly in some ways, you know, here I am. And it's taken a long time to get here, but it's very impressive.

What's brought Tim to the region is the groundbreaking archaeology at the ruin of Vadom Yaacob, a hundred miles north of Jerusalem. On the way there, he wants to take a look at another Crusader castle in the same region. Joining him on the journey is medieval historian and author Dr. David Nicole. For somebody who has a passion for history, especially for Middle Eastern history, this part of the world just grabs you. For me, I fell in love with it. I love the local culture. I like the food. The climate is generally good in terms of allowing you to do stuff,

unless you go in the winter. Yeah, I fell in love with it. It's that kind of passionate place. Like most castles here remaining from the period, this one is now a ruin, but enough of it is left to give an impression of how a major stronghold on Jerusalem's frontier appeared during the late 12th century. In fact, this was the toughest and most impressive Crusader castle in all the Holy Land, the fortress of Belvoir. There were many smaller castles and fortified manners scattered across the Crusader Kingdom. Most were held in the name of the the king by Crusader barons or knights. But Belvoir was different.

It had been built by one of the new crusader forces in the Holy Land. The Knights Hospitaller. The castle was built of black basalt and white marble, and would have been visible for miles. Black castle, it's a bit somber, it's a bit grim, but my giddy heart, it's effective. They are using some white, small amount of white, but it's for decorative purposes, arches, things which need to have attention drawn to them. And also it's a hospital of castle. And they're black and white.

They're black and white. Probably making a statement with the materials immediately at hand anyway. Over the years, many of the original Crusader knights had returned home, leaving the kingdom overstretched in defending pilgrim routes and cities. A new force had come into being to fill this vacuum. Religious orders of knights sworn to fight for the cross.

Among the most notable were the knights of St. John, the Hospitlers, and those who began as the order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple, the Knights Templar. The thing about the Templars, and to some extent the Hospitlers, they didn't do anything else really at this stage other than fight. They just dedicated themselves to Holy War, and as such they became very, very effective professionals. It was the Templars who urged the King of Jerusalem, Baldwin, to build a new castle on the frontier, deliberately threatening Muslim control in the area.

Vadim Jacob was the result. It was to be a huge stronghold, perhaps the largest ever built in the Holy Land. Larger even than the Knights Hospitlers' own great base at Bellevue, a powerful new castle, built at the urging of the fanatical Templar Order. The Muslim enemies of King Baldwin of Jerusalem could not let this stand. Varam Jacob is a day and a half horse ride from Damascus. So anybody who has sat on horseback knows that a day and a half in the medieval period is not going to end you up with saddle sores even if you've never been on horseback.

Things had changed across the eastern frontier too. A new star was on the rise in the Muslim world. His name was Sala Addin, or Saladin. Saladin, that is Saladin, rose to power dramatically and quickly, but it's not a case of coming from nowhere. He had a background, a launch pad, which he was able to use and fortunate in that the circumstances enabled him to establish a dynasty.

He came to power at the right time for himself. Saladin's first move is perhaps surprising to us now, as we imagine the Crusades as a religious war of bitterly opposed ideologies. Saladin did try and solve the problem by using diplomacy. He came with a very, very generous offer to the king and said, I will buy the fortress from you. He doesn't throw a sum of money. He actually calculates how much it costs the Crusaders

to build the fortress up until that minute. And when they declined the first offer, he comes with a bigger offer, and he offers to buy it in order to solve the problem without sending the troops. Maybe the Crusaders knew Saladin was facing famine in his own land and could ill afford to go to war. The offer was refused. In spring 1179, Saladin launched an attack on Vadom Yaakov. But it was badly handled,

and the crusaders easily held out, so the Muslim force had to withdraw. Just weeks later, the curtain wall was completed, at least enough for the castle to be declared complete. The king's army returned to Jerusalem, leaving the rest of the construction under direct command of the Templars. Saladin licked his wounds, learning from his mistakes, and later that same year, he struck again. It's important to remember that when Saladin attacks the fortress in August, it's the second time he's been there.

But by August, when the shell of the fortress is already built, so many of the army, actually, a lot of them already leave the site. So the majority of the people at the site are actually workers, builders, carpenters, and they're really caught with their pants down. They did not expect Saladin to return and try and take the fortress. Saladin knew he only had five days to take the unfinished castle. That's roughly how long it would take a relief force to arrive from the nearest Crusader city, Tiberius. Everything had to happen like clockwork. I think he calculated every move. I don't think he left anything to chance. I think he knew it would take Boduin the fore.

a long time to get his forces together. I also think he probably knew that they would be surprised that he's returning. So he had more advantages here than the Crusaders had it. Five days, all the Templars could do was keep building and hope to hold out. The stage was set.

This time Saladin intended to have, have his way. Vadim Jacob had to fall. People knew there was a castle at Vadim Jacob, but no one had ever investigated it. Ronnie Ellenblum grew up fascinated by his country's richness in history and archaeology. I think the first time I became interested in the history of the Crusades was when I was 14, hiking in the north of the country and visiting the castle of Montfort. The place was just Beautiful. He was captivated and began to study Crusader castles.

In the 1990s, Ronnie mounted the first expedition to Vadim Jacob. He quickly realized it was an ambitious undertaking. So he pulled together a team of people from all over the Middle East, archaeologists, geologists, historians, many of whom had never worked on an excavation before, let alone at a Crusader castle. I remember hearing about Vadim Yaakov the first time and thinking, what amazing story. It's something that's almost too good to be true.

Well, it sounded fantastic. The excavations took place over several years. For all concerned, it was a labor of love, a fantastic opportunity. Like many of the archaeologists involved, Kate Raphael was just starting her career. It was one of those strange coincidences. I was staying on a kibbutz nearby, the, fortress. I was already studying archaeology and somebody on the kibbutz said there's an excavation just below, go and see and I hopped over to have a look and they were in need of an archaeologist

and I got the job without an interview without anything. They just needed somebody for this season. It was hard work, but the team was young and enthusiastic to be working on such a once-in-a-lifetime site. I think the team was unique. There was a very strong buzz of this go, go, go, go. Surviving Crusader castles were usually reused over the centuries, stripped clean of most of their medieval archaeology. But Vadim Jacob wasn't like this. Beneath a top layer of Earth, Kate, Ronnie, and the others found the ruins left by the 1179 siege. the artifacts started surfacing and the story became more evident and we could match the historical sources with what we were finding.

It was like, yeah, it was very hard to stay calm and everybody was just, there was this ongoing excitement which is very hard to maintain insights. It was a compelling story, ready to be unlocked, and the tale of a bloody siege told The builders of Vadim Jacob, carpenters, quarrymen, stone masons, hundreds of them, from all over the kingdom, knew their only chance was to try and get the fledgling fortress to a state where it could withstand assault.

Saladin couldn't allow Vadim Jacob to be completed. His only chance was to eliminate it before it was finished. Vadim Jacob is in a completely different kind of location to say Bellevue or other Crusader castles. It was never rebuilt, re-fortified, or even most of this rubble. There's no significant buildings all the way around here, so even the rubble which was normally stolen and moved away to build houses and things, it was never really used, so it's in remarkable condition.

Much of the site is still buried, so it's not as easy to interpret as, say, the more obvious ruins of Belvoir. But that gives it unique value for archaeologists. The thing I found most important about this site is it's a castle that's not being finished. There are gateways that are unfinished and there are buildings that are unfinished. It's one of the skills of an archaeologist to try and work out how all these clues fit together. It is like a three-dimensional puzzle. And as soon you get the first pieces, you start putting the puzzle together.

and the more of the puzzle you put together, the more of this sort of bigger picture emerges. But you can't help but find other pieces and try to fit them in. And that's the complicated side of archaeology because there are always more pieces to put into it. It's not just the remains of architecture. At Vadim Jacob, you're walking on artifacts all the time.

It's amazing, but it brings its own problems for archaeologists. The problem is, where do you start? and you should start by cleaning the surface up and removing every single piece of pottery and then recording where you found it. But of course when it's this abundant, it would drive you crazy. But you should do it that way

and then of course you can find out what's on the surface and then as you dig down stratigraphically as you go deeper and deeper. Hopefully all those different periods of pottery changes as you go deeper. So you can then work it backwards. Who was there first, who was second, third, fourth until eventually you get to today.

But every time somebody digs a hole, from the surface all the way down to the bottom and then back fill that hole, all that stratigraphy, all those bits of pottery, get jumbled up. And there's trouble with the castle like this, is that everybody's digging holes everywhere. They come to the top of the hill, they think, this is a great place for a castle. And then they start digging holes and digging vaults underground

and then building walls up and then filling the rooms inside, so get a nice flat floor. So all that stuff just gets put back in and spread around nice and evenly. So of course everything is of all the different periods inside that floor level. Fortunately, the story of Vadim Jakob is very well documented in historical accounts. It's known the site was abandoned after the siege, so that gives a definable moment in time

to work backwards from. We know that these people died on a certain date in history, almost within a few hours, and that's really crucial. It's almost like a shipwreck. Ship sailing across the sea, suddenly something happened. Catastrophic event, the ship goes down, and then if you come and discover that ship, hundreds of years later, you can do the archaeology of the ship and you can find out exactly what was on that ship on that day when it sank.

Saladin's first move was to encircle Vadom Yaakov, sealing it off. His archers launched a relentless hailstorm of arrows at the defenders, harassing their every move. There was no time for siege engines to knock the walls down. So instead, he mined under them. For three or four days, both sides toiled hard, Crusaders throwing up barricades and any kind of defense they could, with the Muslim attackers scraping away at the foundations of the walls. Then there was a great roar, smoke and dust.

The Muslims had broken in. Part of the north wall collapsed in an avalanche of masonry and fire, and a savage fight over the burning breach followed. At about the same time, they also attacked the Southgate. There is desperate fighting here. There is a break-in, but at the same time, there's a break-in at the other end. The castle falls from both sides, people making desperate stands, still perhaps hoping against hope that the King's army,

the King of Jerusalem's army is going to appear over that Thar Hill, because he was only a day away. And we're talking about later perhaps in the day. He's only half a day away. So this isn't despair until, you can say, almost the last few minutes. They're not coming to rescue us. So they go down fighting, and there is slaughter. Kate and the other archaeologists picked their way methodically

through the remains of this epic battle. They returned year on year, gradually gaining an understanding of the complex site. It was painstaking work, especially in the hot Middle Eastern summer. There are many, many, many days where you're just moving dust and stones from one part of the planet to another part of the plant and you find absolutely nothing. Whether you're working with radars and the satellite photographs and the aerial photographs

and still the bucket in the spade cannot be replaced. There's nothing you can do about it. It's just you have to have patience. patience and if there's one thing I really learned is go and get yourself more than a handful of patience because that's the only way to do it. And that patience paid off. No other site in the area from the Crusader period,

in fact, from almost any medieval castle anywhere, has yielded such evidence. Our quarries are about five minutes walk from where the fortress is being built. So we have this wedge here, which is really still. very heavy. There are all sorts of tools, echoes of artisans and labourers who found themselves

caught up in a vicious battle for survival. Some would have been very familiar to the archaeologists who excavated them. Tools which might have been used in bitter self-defense. But what about weapons? One of the enigmas we had is that we have 95% of our artifacts belong to the world of building, and construction and we have very very few

weapons here what we think happens is that a lot of the weapons are worth a lot of money and after the battle is finished the people who won comb the site of the fortress and they collect

everything and what doesn't fit them they just take back to the market in Damascus and they sell it So there's a lot of weapons that are gathered from the battlefield. And by the time we come, archaeologists arrive in the field, very little is left. One thing you've noticed is that you do have hundreds,

if not thousands, of these arrowheads. Over several seasons, hundreds of arrowheads were eventually recovered. Most had been shot into the defenses by Saladin's archers. Arrowheads. Each one representing a shot in anger, a living enemy, splinters that remain of the fury between mortal opponents. When we were excavating them, we were just like finding them all over the place. And to an extent that one of the archaeologists came to me, and it was quiet, everybody

had gone to breakfast, and he had said, Kate, can you hear them? I thought, oh no, he's got sunstroke. And really, there was just so many arrowheads that you could actually, if you did close your eyes and use your imagination, you could hear them. whistling by you. Much of the work focused on the southeastern corner of the castle, a complex maze of foundations and unfinished structures, all subsequently raised or buried after the Muslim siege. Slowly they made sense of the architecture.

Along the eastern side of the fortress, there was a huge corridor that stretched for about 150 meters. Now this was divided into sections, and the entire 150 meters had a vault. A huge vault or hall would have looked standard to other castles of the time and place, only much larger. It would have been the core of a giant castle. The castle is impressive now, but if it had been finished, it would have been enormous. And not only that, it would have been dominating the whole landscape around it. And in that respect, it would have had a...

it would have had an influence on the surrounding landscape and the surrounding region. You can't underestimate how important that castle would have been in that location at that time. It might have changed events completely if it had been finished, but it never was. Instead, the unbuilt castle became a graveyard. What happened was that at the end of the battle, Saladin destroys the vote and all the stones. fall on whoever was dead or dying beneath them. What he does as far as an archaeologist is concerned,

he freezes a period and nobody ever walks into that period until we arrive on the scene. There's even rare evidence all around this area of makeshift defenses as the last crusaders prepared for the end. Help definitely wasn't coming. The relief column never. made it to Vadim Yaakov. They were on their own. Late on the fifth day, they made their last stance. Some people get trapped in this corner and they go down fighting. I mean, what else can they

do? Beg for mercy at this stage of a siege, you don't get mercy. If they break in, you die. And if you're going to die, you try to take some of them with you. So you can imagine desperate, close-quarter fighting here with close-quarter weapons, sword, sabers, axes, spears, mazes, you know, whatever They've got trowls, spades, remembering that quite a lot of these people were just simple laborers, they got trapped here. So they're going to go down fighting, even if they know that any hope of rescue is gone, but this is where they're going to sell themselves dearly. We're archaeologists.

We just picked through what's left, but for them it was real, and there was nowhere to run. What was left was a grim reminder of the reality of medieval conflict. excavated all the slaughterhouse, all the common grave. After the battle, a corner of the site became a bone crypt. The place was on fire. People were carrying dead bodies and sawing them here. Across this area, tangled among the rubble of the collapsed walls of the unfinished vault, were more than a dozen skeletons. But to the archaeologists' surprise, they weren't just of humans, but of animals too.

For the team at the Archaeozoological faculty of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, this was the kind of opportunity they'd always dreamed of. Ronnie called our lab, it was in Jerusalem, and asked us to come and see what he got in Vadoumiakum. Then we came and we saw a beautiful excavation with a lot of equid bonds. Equids, horses, donkeys, mules are members of the horse family,

among the most important animals of the medieval period. And here, they could be tied to a solid date and context. That's extremely rare. Perhaps one of the most groundbreaking aspects of all the work at Vadom Yaakov. I think that the excavation of the horses and the humans, from my point of view, are the most important, because there you can get most of the information or you can have information that you can't get from the walls themselves.

So after the excavation, you know, the first thing is just to sort out the bones and see what you have. We found at least 10 equids, and it was very difficult to say which one is a horse or a donkey or a mule. Eventually, Hadas worked out that there were two or three horses. was difficult to be certain. The rest were mostly mules, the utilitarian beasts of burden on a medieval site. So if you look at the mules, probably the mules were used to carry the stones from the quarry into the castle. And the horses were used for the battle. Horses, appearing in medieval battle sites, are very rare. And here there was an opportunity

to unlock one of the mysteries about the Crusaders. perhaps even the Knight Templar horses. Once we identified the horses and separated them from the mules, there were two questions that we wanted to answer. First is which breed, whether it was a local breed, like Arabian horses, or whether it was a European breed, like a shire or a big horse that we know the knights used to ride on.

Once we know the breed, we wanted to know whether they were born, born in Israel and raised in Israel or whether they were brought from Europe over to Israel. Gila and Hadas tried extracting ancient DNA from the bones as part of a wider study on the origin of the Crusader horses. It was only partially successful, maybe due to the burning of the bones during or after the battle. But when they combined what data they had with other techniques, they were more successful. We did some isotope analysis and with the isotope analysis we could differentiate between some of the equity remains in the site. We compared it to Icelandic horses that we knew that they are definitely from Europe. Nobody really knew exactly how many horses or which horses did the crusades bring to Israel.

And whether they came to Israel and then conquered or bought them. some local horses and they rode local horses. We found that most of the horses that we found were actually Arabian local horses and few were European draft horses. Pathology showed how the animals suffered, both in the battle and the aftermath. Some of the horses had a very bad death. They were, you know, they weren't killed at the site. They were They were wounded, brought into the castle, and it took them a while until they died.

You use animals for war. Today you have tanks or other machinery that you used. But that was the time. As well as the animal bones, the collapsed vault also contained human skeletons. All of them were male. All had been burned, like the horses, meaning the profiling couldn't be conclusively. But they all shared characteristics present in European and Middle Eastern DNA. Crusader workmen, soldiers or even knights, maybe Templars, we'll never know. But one had a secret. The archaeologists were amazed to find that he'd kept concealed for more than eight centuries.

One of them had a stack of coins under his armpit, and the conced are actually dated to the exact date of the castle, so that helps also date to the remains. Somehow, Saladin's troops had missed out on a bonus. Maybe the Crusader was already burning or covered with rubble. All the skeletons showed signs of violence. One in particular had severe facial wounds. When you look at the skeleton, you could see a trauma.

It was either somebody used an axe or a... or a hammer or something to hit his head and probably that what caused his death. They were very young. One of them we think around the end of the 20, you know, 27 maybe. And they were healthy and young and he was very told one of them, really warrior or something, I don't know. The battle that face to face is very... it's very brutal and it's very hard to see. It's not a pleasant scene to see. You know, you can feel the battle there.

This corner of Vadim Yaakov retained the last of its secrets until the very end of the excavation. There's something about archaeology. It can be there for days, weeks, and months, but you know what's going to have. what's going to help. According to Murphy's laws, the best finds come at the last moment,

at the last day of the excavation, when you're already folding up all the material and everybody is dying to get home. And we found a skeleton, and we were slowly removing the dirt that was accumulated around the skeleton. And when we got to the skull and the vertebra, so there were arrowheads stuck along the vertebra. He was cornered in a place where he couldn't escape from,

and he was shot at. The feeling was that he knew that it's very easy to kill him, you know. But I don't know why he just went to shoot again and again and again. I remember thinking, wow, this is really, really great and with all the adrenaline and the excitement. And then I remember this cold shiver running down my spine thinking, wow, this guy was walking and he was breathing one. And yeah, so it's that mixture of feelings that goes through.

And it was really like diving in the battlefield and the full sense of the meaning. Of those not killed in the fighting, the lucky ones faced enslavement, probably only the skilled labourers who would be of use to Saladin. For the rest, especially the Templars, there was no chance. In actual fact, this proved to be extremely bloody when the castle fell, as far as we can tell, that people in it were wiped out. Certainly members of the elite, and especially the military orders, and in this case the Templars, They could expect no mercy because they had dedicated their lives to fighting against Islam.

And as such, it'd be unrealistic to expect to be accepted, even if they tried to surrender, which very rarely did. Ronnie Ellen Bloom's extraordinary project has perhaps added more to the archaeological record of the Crusades in Israel than any other. Vardom Yaakov is an amazing sight. It's changed the way we look at the Crusades, not just ecologically, but on a human level. Medieval war is very, very bloody and very full of... When you see it actually happens, I mean, you know, you know, and you think, but when you actually,

you actually see what they did to each other, but it was one-on-one, it was not a kill a mass killing of millions, but I don't know. For me, all these types of violence, I don't like it. But it's my profession to investigate ancient massacres, not modern ones. And that's it. The capture of Vadim Jacob was Saladin's first major victory. Within a few years, he defeated the Templars once and for all, at the Battle of Hatin

and recaptured Jerusalem for Islam. The Crusaders never again took the Holy City and nobody ever again tried to build a castle at Vadom Yaqo. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.