Gone Medieval - Crusader Criminals

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Please be aware that this episode mentions sexual violenceAmongst the countless crusaders who travelled to the Holy Land, there were undoubtedly some who believed they were doing the right thing for their God and King. Others though were gangsters, bandits and even worse, murderers and rapists, bringing horror and terror to the region. In fact, the real tensions stemmed not from religion but from young men - dislocated, disinhibited and present in disturbingly large numbers.Matt Lewis finds out more about the shocking levels of criminality during the Crusades from Steve Tibble. They discuss those who used the cover of Holy War to commit a variety of crimes and how the clues are everywhere, even in the film Casablanca.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. The editor is Ella Blaxill, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’: https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. The Crusades are a long and violent and problematic series of conflicts with an enduring legacy. Undoubtedly, some who travelled to the Holy Land

believed they were doing the right thing, just as those defending their homes did. Today's guest, though, has taken a look at the murkier underbelly of the Crusades, at those who were were probably not there for some noble purpose. Steve Tibble was last with us to talk about the Knights Templar in Britain, but Steve's new book, Crusader Criminals, explores those who used the cover of Holy War to commit a variety of crimes. So welcome back to God Medieval, Steve. Thank you, Matt.

Yeah, very, very lovely to be talking to you again. I should stress that you're absolutely right. We are talking about the Crusades and criminality, but we really are talking about it in the round. So we're not just talking about people leaving Europe, leaving England and then going out to the Middle East. We're talking about people from the far afielders, the borders of China, sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, Syria, everybody fighting in the period of the Crusades. And everybody more or less thought they had a holy war to fight and they all behaved badly. So why was this?

Yeah, very good point. Yeah, hopefully we'll give equal opportunity to criminals everywhere to get their moment during this episode. Absolutely. I guess the first question I'd like to ask as a fairly broad intro is how prevalent was crime during the crusades? We tend to have this idea that it's Holy War for a noble purpose and people were there pursuing what they believed God wanted them to do. So how often were people committing crimes? Yes. Well, you don't want to be too cynical. People were genuinely pious in a way that I imagine you and I can't really relate to. However, pious we might be nowadays, we really don't believe that our immortal soul. is at risk or whatever, those kind of things. But that level of piety on all sides was accompanied by some extraordinarily bad behavior. It really was military tourists from half of the known world all converging in one sort of massive bar brawl. And that was something that struck me very early on actually in writing books that were more obviously about the Crusades, where you tend to do a narrative and you do a battle and a campaign and then they arrive and then

they leave. That whole history is one thing after another. That obviously is very good, but I was conscious in writing that, that kind of book, that there's a whole load of other stuff going on as well. And when people go on Crusade, they have their motivations, whatever they might be, but they're also very comfortable doing the most ghastly things. And I had a moment of revelation, really, when I was writing a previous book called The Crusader Strategy, and I was looking through pilgrim records and some Muslim village records from Nablus. And combining the two, I didn't have a place for them in the book, but they were so odd and so weird. And they were basically telling the same story from two different perspectives.

The Muslim Village Records told the story. These are fairly short records. So they're only recording things that are really important to them. And they recorded an afternoon where they saw Europeans walking down the road and everybody worked in the fields ran and hid and waited until they went pie. And nobody got killed, nobody got raped. And that was the story. it was so unusual. It sticks out in their mind because there was no crime because they managed to avoid it,

which suggests they were expecting something horrible. Yeah, and you look at it and you think, wow, this is really boring story. Why would anybody bother to record that? That's just normal. Except it isn't normal. For them, it was the most abnormal outcome. And bizarrely, we've also got a surviving pilgrim record from the same area, Nablis, from a group of people very similar to those ones.

It's actually a Frenchman walking with a group of his mates down the road through Napolis. and they told the story of how, again, it's a really boring story and weird because the story is they went down the road, they heard these guys in the field singing and making very loud noises, and then nothing happened. They didn't get killed. They didn't get attacked and robbed. And that, again, was so unusual that he felt he had to write about it just to prove to people that weird things like that could happen. So it made me think that we're actually looking at it the wrong way. We look at crime and thinking that's slightly abnormal. But for them, criminality, fear, you know, that violence and rape were such an endemic and such a natural thing to expect that the opposite was a really weird thing.

So that got me set off like that. Yeah, it's so telling that the thing they felt compelled to write down as news, the news at six with their evening meal was some crusaders went by and didn't kill us. Exactly. We walked through a village and the residents didn't kill us. Bong, that's the news. Yeah, it's man-bite dogs, isn't that? Yeah. So why do you think this is something that hasn't really been talked about? Is this an effort to give Crusader grand a sweep usually, or is it an effort to see something

noble and romantic in the stories or to focus on the big personalities and battles? And you need to kind of scratch your way at that underbelly, get rid of some of that dust and blood, and what you're seeing is fairly rampant criminality. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. I think part of the problem is the sources that we're dealing with. and there are two problems. You know, one is, well, a lot of people writing these histories are quite clerically minded. So they're quite religious, often they're priests on all sides.

So they often find these things embarrassing. They're not going to paint their own guys, you know, in a bad light or what have you. So I think the levels of criminality are underreported. And also the other big reason is that people are focusing on the big events. So somebody getting mugged or being surprised that they weren't mugged doesn't make it usually to the big chronicles. So I was just really lucky that those couple of accounts survived for that area at that time. But it's not the norm. We don't have the crime statistics.

What we do have is the normal, one thing after another, horizontal slice of history. But the other key thing to bear in mind is people don't write about things that are obvious. So I lived a book a few years ago about the role of Arabs in the Crusader armies. Actually, I think most crusaders were not white men. Most people in most armies were Christian Arabs or Christian Syrians or Armenians or what have you. But it's very rare to find it in the sources because, well, everybody knows that a crusader army is full of Arabs and Syrians. You know, for the people writing it, it was so obvious. And the same with the imagery.

When you see a painting and you see what we assume are Muslim soldiers, I think actually most of the time, we're looking at normal rank and file in a crusader army. So it's the same thing here, that criminality is so much in the core of people's lives that it doesn't normally come out. So rather than looking at the kind of horizontal sweep battle campaign, marriage, wedding, so on. I tried to look at it the other way, look at it vertically and look at the big events that are pushing demographics. So looking at things like climate change, looking at things like mass migration, and what effect that would have on demographics, because that's really what propels criminality nowadays and then. And then looking at the things that are so small

and so granular that they don't really feature in normal history. You know, the muggings, the banditry, the pirates and so on. People that kind of embarrassing. People try to brush them under the carpet, but they're actually a massive part of everyday life that we just don't see. Yeah, I'm often very fond of complaining that we forget that a lot of the European history that we have comes down to us from monks who are writing this stuff down. So their view of the crusade is this is our mission to go and reclaim the holy land in God's name. They're not going to be writing, blind me, we're an awful bunch of thugs, aren't we? Even if we got the job done in the end. So we always have to remember the

bits that they're likely to be missing out as well. So it's fascinating that you found some evidence to kind of increase our understanding of all of that. You touched on a little bit there, but I wonder if we could talk about some of the drivers of a crime wave kind of accompanying a religious campaign. What drives those kinds of people there and then what causes them to commit crime? I think the key distinction is between proximate causes, the local tactical ones, and the ultimate causes. And so I tried to look at both because obviously one causes the other. There's been a lot of work recently about the ultimate causes of the Crusade from an anthropological point of view, which is particularly around climate change in the eastern Mediterranean in the century

leading up to the first crusade. And it's a really weird kind of little phenomenon that happened. It was huge and horrible for the people at the time, but it's very little understood. And basically that part of the world has two weather systems, one in the Eastern Med and then one really specific one in Egypt, which is fed by African countercyclones. And the ebb and flow of the Nile. And what you find in the 11th century is we've got a lot of anecdotal data that the climate in Syria and the Western steps deteriorates massively. And normally, that would be a problem, but it wouldn't be a disaster because the Nile is very fertile and it basically feeds the whole region. But we have some really weird quantitative data about the ebb and flow of the

Nile because ever since Roman times, people have been keeping track of it. They have nylometers, as you know, measuring stations on the Nile. And, you know, it used to be a famine every 50, 52 years, that kind of measure. They were happening every four or five years in the century running up to the Crusades. So you have a double whammy. Normally, it's a kind of fail safe. You know, if the weather's bad in one region, the other one picks up the slack. But in the run up to the Crusades, it fails and it's no longer safe.

So the whole system collapses. And you find these guys on the steps, the Turkic tribes who trigger off the Crusades by invading the Middle East, really haven't got much choice. There's this mass migration in place, and they're very powerful, very strong, very militarily violent. But in fairness to them, they don't have a lot of choice either. They don't have a lot of social security systems in place. If their animals die, you know, they're going to be the next one. So you have to keep moving to find better climate and all food and riches. So they were propelled into the Middle East. And then that triggers the whole thing of the Crusades. You know, you're fighting with the Byzantines, the Turks start fighting the Fatimid

Egyptians who are obviously Muslim. You get guys coming from as far off-field as Ireland or Germany down into the area. So within a few years, you get this unending torrent of warm bodies into the area. And they're coming from, you get the guys from the steps, sometimes by the 13th century, they're coming from afar afielders, the borders with China. Fatimid Egypt is calling in African slaves from sub-Saharan areas. The Crusaders are calling in people from all over Europe. The Byzantans are doing everything they can. And the wars just go on for 200 years. It's not like a normal war.

It's not like Jane Austen writing about the Napoleonic wars. And you're barely even aware that they're taking place. And this is 200 years of continuous warfare. Peace never breaks out. There's the occasional truce. And in that process, you suck in what is traditionally the world's worst criminal demographic, which is young men who are armed, they're dislocated from their families and from the societies they're in.

and they're at a loose end, they're unemployed or underemployed. It is your worst nightmare. And it's true nowadays as well. If you look at areas where there is most disruption, whether it's a narco gang in South America or an uprising in Africa or even the kinds of characters who are doing most damage in the Ukraine war or whatever, it's always that demographic that leads. But the weird thing in the Crusades,

which nobody's ever really looked at in detail, is that it was a once in a multiple lifetime event. Well, these guys were just sucked into the area. It was like a magnet for 200 years. And the impact on society was appalling. It's huge. I think it's fascinating to think about those external drivers because we think the Crusades is all about religion.

It's driven by one religion moves here, the other one fights back and then there's a resurgence. And we're not thinking when we do that about these wider ecological climate drivers that are forcing those things to happen. You know, the Turks didn't come on a religious crusade. They came because they needed food and water and a place they could survive. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, I think we take quite a Eurocentric view of all this. So we assume it's about us going to the Middle East and it's about our religion against somebody else's religion. As you quite rightly point out, very little of it. You know, the climate doesn't know what religion you are. The forces of mass migration are not religiously based. Or they certainly weren't in this case. most of the Turks that originally came down in the early generations, these are not theology students.

Most of them became Muslim or were Muslim, but it was very vague. They're huge, huge drinkers. They're basically step people. Some people in the tribe would still be into shamanism. They like their astrology. They like drugs and alcohol. You're not talking about a theology school here. And the other thing is, because we're so Eurocentric, we kind of forget that they were fighting everybody. All the sedentary societies in Syria, and Egypt were Muslim at that time. And they took the full brunt of it. And they were all beaten by the Turks.

They were the ones who really had to worry about it. So our guys waded in to help their co-religionists. But it wasn't really about religion. It's a war of anthropology, driven by climate. So it's nomads against sedentary societies driven by forces that they're not even aware of, particularly because they're so big. But they're certainly not to do with whether you like the Bible or the Quran in the first instance. Yeah.

And then I guess you throw into that. As you say, the idea of lots of young men taken away from their home, so the usual checks and balances are being removed. They're there for violence. So criminality sort of fits with what they're doing anyway. The religion does mean that there's an element of kind of othering the enemy as well. So that must make it easier to view them as potential victims of your criminality because you don't view them as human as equal, because the reason that you're there means that you think of them as somehow lesser than you.

So what kind of crimes did you come across most often? What kind of things are Crusaders doing when they get to these events? I think you're absolutely right. This whole othering thing acts as a kind of proximate propellant to violence. But I was continually shocked

how happy people were committing crimes against their own religionists. A lot of it is just about opportunity. I think at the margins, you know, a bandit would rather mug somebody of a different religion. But they're not going to say, oh, fine, on your way, mate. I think you're the same religion as me. Criminality is so rife.

I've read a lot of this during lockdown, and so you end up watching a lot of crazy films that you wouldn't have watched otherwise. There was a moment when I was watching Casablanca, and it kind of explained to me what was happening in the Crusades. You know, there's that funny moment. The captain, Louis Reno, says, as a joke, we'll round up the usual suspects.

And that is so true. I mean, there's effectively two parts of that. sentence. You know, who are the usual suspects? Well, it's pretty much what the Crusades are. You know, it's all that new demographic. It's young men, it's dislocation. It's armed and dangerous, that kind of thing. But there is this whole process about rounding up. So it's the trope of lazy policing as you round up these guys. But in the Crusades, I think it's almost like the first sort of cultural experience where they don't need rounding up. They round themselves up for 200 years. they're bust in in incredibly high numbers into this poor region that suffers from it.

And they commit every kind of crime imaginable. I think the internet encourages people to have more imaginative views of all the nasty things they can do. And obviously those guys didn't have the internet. But they did have plenty of long winter evenings to think about things. And they came up with some absolutely ghastly things. And it's really the converse of what we said at the beginning of the conversation, really. For nothing to happen was a surprise. So if you take that as your baseline, the world's your oyster, really.

And that was one of the sort of fun things about the book was being able to look at every different kind of criminality. So I've got chapters on pirates, gangsters, bandits, murderers, domestic violence. They're all interesting stories at a distance. But you can imagine, you know, from a thousand years away, everything becomes an anecdote. But for the granularity of people's lives at the time, it must have been ghastly. It was just hell on earth, really. It was the opposite of the land of milk and honey, really.

Yeah, and as you say, for 200 years almost solid as well. So for generations of people living through this, this would have been all they knew. For four, five, six, seven generations of families would only have known this kind of horror and upheaval and rampant criminality and lack of control. It must be a fairly terrifying way for that whole region to have lived for two centuries.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you've put your finger on it. there. There is this kind of normalization and desensitization that takes place. And you can see that time and time again, where you think people would come back from battle and relax and you're glad to see the family and so on. Actually, it doesn't work like that, that you actually end up with a bunch of psychos going home. You know, for instance, I read about the impact of Russian troops and particularly from the prisons going back into civil society in Russia and the impact that's having on the crime figures there. And I think that's very much what you see in the Crusades, whether they're

on the battlefield or not, these are a bunch of desensitized, bloodthirsty guys, all armed. And it has a ripple effect on society. So the Arab population of the Holy Land in the 12th century had been almost completely demilitarized. They weren't used to carrying arms. Within a generation or two, it's the opposite. Everybody's carrying arms the whole time. Even you find Catholic priests, you know, who obviously are not allowed to carry arms, they're not allowed to do fighting.

Christianity in theory is fairly pacifistic. There are specific regulations saying, yeah, of course, guys, of course you can carry lances and maces and things like that, because you're protecting your people, you're a local leader in a village. What else are you going to do? Because everybody is carrying weapons. Because it sounds like from what you're saying that anybody could be a victim as well. It wasn't the case that Christians are going and picking on Muslims or vice versa. Anybody was fair game if you wanted to steal something or commit a crime. Yeah, and you're actually right. And that's what desensitization does. The boundaries come down. the normal limits of civil society just disappear. And you find this high levels of murder. We haven't got statistics. So it's hard to say it got worse in the 1160s, for instance. But you can just see the granularity of the data that's coming through is horrific. Absolutely horrific.

And how efficient or how interested were crusading armies and military and political leaders in punishing criminals? Yeah, that's a good point. It sort of depends. Most of the time, it's actually not very helpful. have a bunch of criminals causing problems. As a general, you don't want your guys beating up civilians if you're on campaign. Yeah, and you're quite obviously, see, like, ordinances for armies will talk about the fact that you're not allowed to commit these crimes on punished

pain of death and all that kind of thing. So normally armies are quite keen to maintain discipline. Yeah, very much so. That's where you get things like taring and feathering on the Third Crusade. It sounds a bit like, you know, Hollywood Western. It's all a little bit of fun. But actually, it involved putting red hot burning tar on your head, which would involve massive scarring. Your hair would drop out. You'd be just scarred for life. And it was a way of visibly showing that although you hadn't been killed, you were a criminal. So wherever you walked, people knew you were a criminal.

So that was actually pretty harsh. And you'd find mass hangings and so on. But the trouble is there's only so much you can do. A lot of the people in this society don't have money. There are very few prisons. These societies are not very productive. they don't have a lot of excess wealth. So there's no big prison system in the Crusader states.

You get the old dungeon, you know, but that's mainly for holding prisoners to ransom, really, or torturing your mate when he's got on the wrong side of you. There's not really a big deterrence for crime. So you find that punishments have to be very overt and extreme. Like, you steal a pig, I'm going to cut your arm off, say. Or if you try and steal a pig, even though you've only got one arm, then we hang you.

You know, and they're very big, visible crimes. Or they're very light, in which case you just say, get out of town. You know, we don't want to see you back in the village. You just get rid of people because they are the usual suspects if you can get rid of them. So, yeah, it's quite a binary system, very visible. There are sometimes when it is helpful to have these nutters doing disturbing things if you're leading an army into enemy territory. And you find certainly some kinds of troops.

So some of the early step troops fighting on mainly for Syrian Muslim army, is were very basic guys and they were fighting for plunder. So they would come in. And if there wasn't plunder to be found, they would be a massive nuisance, you know, in your own territory. So you'd find that their employers would want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And if they didn't want to go home to the steps, which they might not be able to because there isn't food there because of the climate change,

you then tried to propel them into enemy territory so they could make a nuisance of themselves at someone else's expense. There's a fabulous anecdote where a Syrian prince, who's a massive criminal in his own right, he committed murders from the age of 12 and was so proud that he wrote about them. But he was working for the Egyptian government at the time, and they sent him on a mission

to go and recruit some of these Turkic troops from one of the Syrian states. When he got there, all the good Turkic troops were employed. But the one place where he ended up, the local authorities said, okay, you can have the rubbish ones that we're not interested in, the ones that were so rubbish that we didn't put them in the army. And there were nearly a thousand men just wandering

around making a nuisance of themselves. A thousand men, that is the same number of nights in the entire Holy Land. So just to give you a sense of the numbers. So in that one moment in time, in one place, there are a thousand of these, what are effectively, you know, bandits. A lot of what we're talking about is in Mad Max territory. We're talking about biker gang mentality. And you can just recruit and move these guys into the army. But if you leave them underemployed for more than a few days, they just turn instantly from an army into crazy criminals. Yeah, it sounds like a bit of military nimbism. You know, you don't want these guys around to cause trouble. So what you're going to do is move them into an area where they can cause someone else a bit of trouble, ideally

your enemy. I was going to ask, you know, does crime always hinder the aims of crusading forces? Because it sounds like there was ways in which they could harness it. There are ways in which when you're in a foreign territory, perhaps terror and fear is partly what you want. So do we see leaders sometimes harnessing this idea of criminality to try and achieve their aims? Yes, yeah, definitely on all sides. The problem from the European crusaders' point of view was that they were usually fighting on their own territory. It was normally, after the first crusade was over, it was normally defensive or they were travelling through, say, Byzantine territory where they're fellow Christians. So in those situations, if the guys run riot,

which they're quite capable of doing anyway, then they're causing a real problem because The Pope doesn't want fellow Christians killed. Generals don't want things to go out of hand. They want to be able to buy supplies from the local people rather than having them drag everything up into the hills and hide them. So, yeah, it's not very helpful. It becomes more helpful when you're entering enemy territory. And because the Crusaders tend to be outnumbered

and defending a thin strip of land on the coastal, literal of the Middle East, they tend not to be in enemy territory so much. It's much more advantageous for the, say, the turbanes, a kick arm is coming through because it means they can attract a lot of these really tough soldiers into the area without having to pay them a lot of money. So they basically give them a free pass saying, okay, lads, you know, we're going to go and take this town and you can have everything in it. I haven't got enough money to pay you, but you'll be fine, trust me. And then halfway through the campaign or at the end of the campaign, they chuck a sheep on the back of their horse, and they go

home. It's a really weird military economy. Yeah. So thinking of that village that we spoke about at the start where there's this case of a crusading force kind of go through and the big news is that nothing happens and also that the Christian walking through the village feels the same way. We've talked a lot about people going to the regions and committing the crimes. How much do we see local populations getting involved? Are we in danger of just viewing them as victims when they're actually as much criminal elements to them as they were to the crusaders? Yeah, that's 100%. Right. There are different demographics here. Crime is gendered. If you look at a UK prison, it's 96% men. And of those, you know, vast majority tend to be younger men. If you look at the

American criminal system, it's 95% men. In the Crusades, I suspect it's even higher than that. So women are overwhelmingly victims of crime rather than perpetrators, which is obviously horrible. So that features in everything. You find that it is also, you know, old people are suffering more. It's the classic thing where men who are strong and are armed take advantage of those who are weak. It's just writ large. So that whole thing, works its way through. The population of the Holy Land when the Crusades break out are, as I mentioned, largely demilitarized. On the Muslim side, they tend to be Arab civilians and most of their armies are provided by Turks. So nearly all the armies are foreign when you start off. So obviously

the Crusaders are foreigners. Byzantine has still got a stake in the north. They're foreigners to the area. Most of the Muslim leaders are foreign. They're either Turks in Syria or Armenians who run Egypt. There's a big disconnect between the local peoples and power, and that's also reflected in the criminality. So they start off being very much victims. Having said that over time, you know, you find that the local population get armed and that whole thing kicks into place. That feels like a natural reaction, doesn't it? Because if you're deprived of power in your own home and you're the continual victim of crime, there must come a point where you think we have to do something about this and necessarily what you have to do is almost resort to the same

tactics that you're suffering from. You fight fire with fire because it's the only choice that you have. Absolutely. It's kind of magnificent seven. The biker gang comes in. In the first instance, you hire a few mercenaries to help you, but then after that, everybody has to mock in. And that is kind of a microcosm of how the local communities reacted. You find Crusader armies, you know, I can't definitively give you numbers, but I think Crusader Armis, other than lads who are coming, alms coming straight from Europe, were predominantly local people. They were fighting for their communities, mostly Christian Arabs, but also Christian Armenians, Christian Syrians and so on. Occasionally, you find a castle, for instance, surrenders. And at the point of surrender,

you find everybody is Arab. There's not a single white man in the garrison, the commanders and Arab, all the men are Arabs. And it's not usually mentioned because it's so obvious. I think at the time, We just knew that's what the army was. It was whatever it was, 70% local people or mixed race. A lot of the crusaders went over there and stayed and they didn't bring their women with them. They got married to local Arabs very quickly, right from the remnants of the First Crusade. So it's a very mixed society and local people have to fight to defend themselves. Yeah, and I think we, although we think of those elements of locals having to defend their homes from these invading armies all of the time, We don't necessarily think about the broader impact on the cultures and societies of the Middle East and the Near East,

that they're having to deal with all of this, that they are almost forced to resort to the same sort of criminality, that they're living with all of this violence around them all of the time. For a population that, as you say, was demilitarized for the most part, relatively peaceful, it's a huge shock to their culture, surely, that must have left a mark in the way that they lived. Yeah, absolutely right. And in fairness, you know, you kind of think of them as being vulnerable victims. But actually, once you look on the ground within a generation or two, because they have to respond, they're just as bad as everybody else. You look at, you know, the horse thieves or any kind of activity.

There's one fabulous anecdote, again from that same village in Nablus, where they just told them this is an everyday event. There was a local merchant came from Damascus, and I think he was going to Ascalon. He passed through the village, stopped for the night. He hired guards. Okay, so he had guards with him. He hired extra guards. So that tells you something. Then at nighttime, when the guys were around the campfire,

two other civilians who were local Christians, Frankish, but probably mixed race, turned up. And they were looking for firewood. And they tie everybody up, steal everything, and then they go. It's an extraordinary story, really, because it's just security problem after security problem. It does show exactly what you've just said. said, really, which is the impact it has on society. So the cost of, you know, logistical supply,

the cost of distributing goods must have gone up tenfold. So the merchants have to hire police, even when they hire their own police guards, they're not adequate. Even the police get tied up. And the people who tied them up weren't even criminals. Well, they were in effect, but these were people looking for firewood. They were not bandits out looking for trouble. It's just that everybody is so criminal at this point. And any opportunity is just pounced on. And just to return to those people who go to this area and a chunk of them will eventually go home, do we have any sense of what it does to these young men to then return home? Do they take those criminal proclivities, that desensitization?

Do they take that back home with them? And do we see any evidence of that? Sadly, there isn't a huge amount of evidence. I would suspect, sadly, that it didn't have a very helpful influence. We certainly see it the other way around. And we know that all of the armies implore. criminals if they could. You know, people who were already criminal were bust in. So certainly, say in England, a lot of the prisons were cleared and people were given a choice. You know,

you can either rot in this dungeon for 10 years or you can save your immortal soul and do good work in the Holy Land, you know, and most people, you can imagine what choice they took. But also, we're back to that criminal Nimbism, aren't we? You know, let's take all of our criminals and send them over there where they can do something we consider vaguely useful to somebody else. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, you've effectively solved your problem and give a useful problem to your enemies. But I strongly suspect what happened when they went home, if they went home, you know, a lot of them either stayed or got killed or whatever, is pretty much what the Russian crime statistics are seeing now. You let people out of prison, you give them the

opportunity to go wild and do all the nastiest things they've been thinking about while they've been in their dungeon, and then they come back and they're not going to join the Women's Institute. These are horrible people. We've talked a fair bit about fairly modern parallels to this, so prison populations in this country, prison populations in the US, things that are happening in Russia and various conflicts and hotspots around the world. So I wonder whether having written this book about the impact of criminality in regions when it's focused in this kind of way, are the lessons that we can take away from what was happening a thousand years ago today? Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right. It's around ultimate causes, really. I mean, the guys over the 200 years

of the Crusades were incredibly impacted by climate change. They didn't realize it, but that is what was happening. So in fairness to them, they did the best they could to cope. So they had climate change, it triggered mass migration, that triggered a 200 years of war. And they really did the best they could to defend their interests, defend their people and so on, on all sides. And I think they really had good strategic vision. But, you know, I find time after time, they've got leaders who, are really careful and do really clever things. And we have governments who are so rich. You know, we're much more productive societies. We've got much more knowledge. We've got much more resources. And we've got governments that talk about strategy and planning and stuff like that. And they're

normally rubbish at it. They're just using it for PR purposes. Whereas, you know, the Crusaders and their enemies really did have good strategy. And they didn't talk about it because they didn't have that vocabulary. But you can see what they're doing is great. So I think one thing that we can learn is to try and act poor. If you're poor and you've got nothing, you need to be careful and think hard. And I think we're too profligate. We've got so much that we feel we can just behave in a very unfocused way. But I think the overall thing is that we don't have the excuse. The Crusaders and their enemies had no idea what was happening, but they still put up a pretty good show of doing the best they could. Whereas what you can see is if you let climate change

get out of control, if you get migration that's out of control, then it puts societies under a lot of stress. And most governments on the planet are looking to tackle those problems, but they're very difficult to solve. But we've got resources. If we've got political determination, we should be able to solve them. But there's not a lot of evidence of that really. Yeah. And I guess it's one of those, we can talk about a real life warning from history. They had a period of climate change and pressure that moved people around and changed demographics, we have exactly the same now. 900 years ago, a thousand years ago, that led to 200 years of horrific war focused in a region that has been unsettled almost ever since.

I mean, if we can't learn from that, what are we doing? No, I know. I know. And absolutely, we've got the tools, we've got the money, you know, we've got the knowledge, but we often don't have the political will to do what's just and right. I find it slightly depressing if I think about it. But on the other hand, you know, we don't have many excuses. We should really focus on addressing these big issues and making sure that, you know, people are protected on all sides from these forces that are way beyond their control. It's not that anybody in this is being evil. People are doing what they have to do. You know, you may be in a kind of mad max gang, but if you have to move, you have to move. If you're going to die, if you don't move, you've got

no choice. So it's very difficult to find a kind of a moral high ground here. It is more about doing the right thing with enough time and enough planning and enough strategy to accommodate. Yeah. I mean, I'm always fascinated when we can look at these things from the past. It's easy for us to sit here and kind of be all high-handed and judgmental and look at those stupid people a thousand years ago who didn't have a clue what they're doing. But I often wonder what people will make of us in a thousand years' time. Yeah. Yeah, you probably don't want to know, really, do you? Yeah, we're given the knowledge that we have and what we know we're doing. But there are lessons that we can learn there. And there are things that we can take on

from a thousand years ago in history that could be helping us today. And here was me thinking you were just going to say, don't send your kids off to Abitha, because they'll turn into rampant criminals disconnected from their home with nothing better to do. That can be true as well, but yeah. Yeah, but there's a slightly bigger picture there too. Thank you so much for joining us, Steve.

It's absolutely fantastic to talk about this and fascinating to get into that dirty underground business of the Crusades. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Matt. I really enjoyed that. Steve's new book Crusader Criminals, The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land, is out now from Yale University Press.

You can catch Steve's last Gone Medieval episode on the Templars in Britain, and you can listen to more on the statecraft that surrounded all of this criminality with Nicholas Morton in our episode, Rise of the Crusader States. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday.

So please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. It really does help us and you'll be doing us a big favour. You can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, add free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at History Hits, As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.