Gone Medieval - Life on Crusade

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Accounts of the Crusades were usually commissioned by wealthy and influential people about themselves, to make their piety and righteousness known to others. But what about the less glamorous people who went on Crusades? And what was life like when they did so? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega finds out about ordinary crusaders and their experiences from Dr. Simon Thomas Parsons.This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. When you think about the Crusades, and who doesn't, chances are that you think about the many royals who made the journey to the east. Whether it's Richard the Lionheart famously making his way to the Holy Lands, or his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, leading her own army decades before, our imaginations tend to place crusaders squarely in the royal category. There is, of course, a reason for this, and it is, as usual, sources. Our records are often commissioned by very wealthy and influential people who wanted to make it known down through history that they weren't just fancy.

They were also pious. But kings and queens make up an infinitesimal section of society, so who were all the other crusaders? Can we call anyone who went out to the Holy Land normal? And what was life like when they did so? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm joined by Dr. Simon Thomas Parsons, a lecturer in medieval history at the University of Bristol, working on Crusade texts, medieval sexualities, and women's participations in Crusades. He's going to help us sort out what the average person experienced on Crusade.

First of all, Simon, a huge welcome to show. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. So we dragged you here in order to talk about life on. crusade. Everybody knows about the battles. Everybody knows about the big clashes between people. But what we don't often think about is what life is actually like. So what would you say ordinary people are kind of experiencing when they go on crusade? And what kind of time period are we talking about when we say that? Okay. Well, I think the first thing to do is to suggest that there isn't really a typical crusader. There aren't really ordinary people on crusade because every crusade is so

functionally different. The Crusades is a term that is used to apply to medieval, what I would like to call sacralised warfare, so warfare that has aims of holy objectives or perceived holy objectives. And it's a kind of amorphous definition that covers wars stretching from around 1095, all the way through to 1291, and then debatably further beyond that as well. And within that, there's tremendous diversity of expeditions. So they're all slightly different. And so there is no such thing as a typical crusader. And also the types of people that go on crusade are quite weird often. They're often atypical cross-sections of society. And so they do not normally include the everyday folk that you would imagine in Western Europe. So we see an unrepresentative preponderance of aristocratic

participants of knights, not necessarily particularly unusual characters, but just not a full cross-section of society. So there is no really ordinary crusader. And every expedition is different. The earlier ones tend to be more overland, and the First Crusade in particular, has long stretches of its journey that crosses across eastern and central Europe, then Anatolia, and into the Levant. Whereas later Crusades, most of their journeying is done by sea, and that's a very different experience. So in answer to your question, there isn't really a typical experience. And trying to uncover what ordinary life was like is a particularly kind of vexed question. Okay, so I'll give you a slightly easier one. then it's not easier.

So what's the general context of what's going on in Europe and the Near East during this period? Because it's like 200 years of time to deal with when we're trying to run it down, really. Yeah, absolutely. So the crusading movement as traditionally conceptualized, starting in 1095, emerges into a very changed world, recently changed world. In Western Europe, there's a great deal of social and religious changes, which are stemming up from this kind of reform papacy. In other words, the papacy has suddenly decided to get its act together and try to exercise influence over Western Latin Christendom. And one of the things it's trying to do is to offer new ways of combining secular and religious life. And one of those things is crusade.

And then from a geopolitical perspective, Latin Christian Europe is expanding as well. So we see all sorts of manifestations of this. Like we see the Norman Congress could be understood in this regard of Norman Knights expressing their control over. that England, we see normal adventures in Sicily, we see the Italian city-states in North Africa, so Western Latin Europe is expanding geopolitically. And then in the east, the Seljuk Empire is running roughshod over the old Amosid Caliphate. So around 1100, absolutely everything is changing in the Eastern Mediterranean. And the Crusades are just one element of that. So that's the general context for where the crusading movement emerges from, a time of rapid geopolitical change. And the interesting thing

is for Latin Europe, it's a big deal, because participants are heading to Jerusalem, they are reclaiming the Holy Land, and is unexpectedly successful from their perspective. Whereas in a wider sense, the Islamic world is just not really bothered about what's going on. This is one of many complex wars that are happening in the Mediterranean. So the Islamic world, at least initially, is not particularly fuss by the Christianity movement, but becomes more so by the course of the 12th century. When they first show up, it's more of a, huh, Anything else? Oh, yeah. These Byzantines look weird, I think is the general perception of most of the

Lebanese Islamic Pouts. Yeah, I mean, I suppose that's true. It's not as though the Byzantine Empire hasn't been fighting with everyone in the near East the entire time. You know, if you have some Christians in your backyard, it's not that out of the ordinary. And how are you supposed to know the difference between a French guy and a Greek guy, I guess? Yeah, particularly. And also because, you know, not all of the Crusaders are French. Many of them are German. Many of them are French-speaking, but from southern Italy or Sicily. Many of them probably also speak Arabic as well. Lots of them are conversant probably in Greek. And so it's a tremendously heterodox population that goes on crusade. And so it's quite hard to sort of categorize it solely as our Western Latin Christian monoglot culture

that just suddenly ends up in the Levant. There's much more complex transmissions of people going on all over the place. That makes sense. I guess the next question here is about sources. Let's geek out a little bit because when we get crusading sources a lot of the time, obviously what they're going to do is they are there to big up emperors or lords or kings or whoever has managed to go on holiday. I say holiday because it kind of is for them, right? It's like, oh, this is the biggest religious thing that you can possibly do. Congratulations. You know, like you're going to get so many points from God for going over to the Holy Land. It's going to be excellent, right? But how do we use these same sources in order to figure out if we can accept that not everybody is ordinary,

like not everyone's a serf, which is what's ordinary in Europe. What can we know about not the king, I suppose, based on sources? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a couple of things to say there. The first one is I absolutely agree with the characterization of crusades as a holiday at certain points. You do see, particularly in the later medieval crusades, you see the Crusades in the Baltic, the Weissan, are treated by aristocracy very much as a period of, at holiday they go on to have fun. So I'd just like to echo my support for the kind of nature of crusades as a sort of holiday, although a serious one, a one with serious implications as well. So yeah, with regards to your question about source material, yes, the sources we have

do tend to be focused on the elites, the aristocrats. Surprisingly, in many crusades, not really kings. So the First Crusade famously doesn't have royal participants. The second and third Crusades do, but still lots of the sources are more interested in the activities and participation of aristocrats and knights. And so already you're starting to move down the social hierarchy and you do see glimpses, despite the intentions of these sources, to represent that kind of experience. You see glimpses of what life must have been like. For the first crusade, and you said you wanted me to get geeky, so I'll get a tiny bit geeky. For the first crusade, we have a tremendously wide range of primary sources, many of them, at least ostensibly written by

participants. And they're writing obviously after the crusade, so they're writing with the benefit of hindsight, and casting all of their experiences in the way they want them to be understood, the correct framing. And yet there are these little indications of experience, of starvation, in particular being a very common theme on the First Crusade, just famine more broadly, economic exigency, people kind of selling mules to eat and so on, famously riding cattle, really dire situations. And also being shocked by certain climactic conditions in the East as well. You might expect that to be, wow, isn't it hot out in the desert in the Levant? But that's not really what they write home about.

Many of them are surprised at how cold it is. There's the famous letters from Stephen of Blois to his wife Adler. And in that, he mentions how desperately cold the kind of mountains of Romania, of Anatolia, are. Because the extremes of temperature was something that was not really experienced so much by French participants. So you do see these glimpses of what Crusade experience was like, even though it's all. all viewed through the prism of how their experiences were meant to be. And I guess one final thing to say on that, which is that how those experiences were meant to be was a kind of holy suffering. So crusade texts became increasingly keen to emphasize how horrible the crusade actually was as an

experience in order to help to aggrandize the reputation of those who put themselves through it. So they'd gone, they'd suffered in imitation of Christ, and they'd come back. And so the way that we can see the lives of people on crusade has to be viewed through that prism of them romanticizing already very shortly after the experiences, their own experiences, and not in the way that we would think of romanticization. Sometimes it's pretty grim reading. Okay, so it's very much no one has suffered like me, except for our Lord Jesus Christ on the Christ. So basically, you've got these people who are lined up to do this really difficult thing, and it is difficult. It's difficult to move this far. Frankly, I don't want to be out in the

mountains of Anatolia at night, sleeping around a catfire. Sounds bad. How did people get recruited to go on crusade for this sort of thing? Is this specifically like a pilgrimage thing? Is this you get to be like Jesus or is it more military or can we actually disentangle religious and military in this sense? First of all, you can't properly fully disentangle them, although it's useful to think that you maybe can for the purposes of understanding the processes of recruitment. So obviously, people don't act. either for religious motivation or for secular, pragmatic reasons, they act because both align, both work for them. And so there is a sense in which we can't allow consideration of

how people get recruited to be a reflection just of pragmatic circumstances. They believe in what they're doing. They believe in largely, at least, they believe in going to avenge Christ to reclaim the holy places, to protect the Eastern Christians. So there's a lot of matters of belief here as well. But what I would say is that it tends to be the case that people go because their community is committed to the cause, because their lords are going, because people that they know are going. And when you get after over a certain tipping point of recruitment, then you tend to get very, very wide participation. A good way of thinking about this is the First Crusade. There are some parts of Europe, despite the fact that the Crusade message is heard

all over Europe. There are some parts of Europe that have very low participation. in the First Crusade. One of them is the British Isles. But if you look at certain areas of France, and there's this kind of corridor running from the Loire Valley all the way across to the Rhineland, right across the middle of France. And basically, every man and his uncle and his brother and his cousin and their cat and their horse and whatever, they're all going. And I think that you can only really explain that in terms of these circles of patronage of support of community. And I think that it's important to remember that Crusade is cast and is preached as a communal thing. What are you going to do to help your brothers in the East? And so that sort of message seems to

be understood by medieval communities as extolling the value of community just full stop. And so if your community is going to go and help, you should go and help as well. So I think that helps to explain why we see these patterns of recruitment. But I might talk a tiny bit about what that process of recruitment actually looks like. It's very different across this whole movement. For the First Crusade, largely very informal, seems to be a matter of enthusiasm. it's quite hard to get to grips with what exactly goes on there. By the time we get to the second, the crusade, the third crusade, and into the royal crusades of the 13th century,

probably most of the people that are going on crusade are going in royal retinues or aristocratic retinues, and so they are persuaded or induced to go. That's not to say they don't take boughs, but they're persuaded or induced to go because they belong to royal retinues. And it's very much like a military campaign, or becomes much more like a military campaign, in the Third Crusade onwards, and it provisioned and supplied and recruited in similar ways by royal commissioners.

Okay, so a big way to go is basically your Lord tells you to do it. Your King tells you to do it. Is it possible to go on Crusade if you're not in a Lord's retinue? Can you just pick up and go if you feel like it? It's possible to go. It's pretty hard to survive. Because if you start getting on a horse and then riding from Northern France to Jerusalem, without support, you're probably not going to get very far. And increasingly from, again, the middle of the 12th century, when most people are going on boats,

you need a lot of money to go on a boat. Boats are expensive. Paying for sailors is expensive. And so as a result, the resources that are needed make it prohibitive for many successful crusaders to go it alone. Or very many, quote-unquote, lower-class crusaders to go. There are exceptions to this, and there are groups of people inspired

by crusading enthusiasm who do attempt to go and by banding together get a certain proportion of the way. But none of them really ever reach their destinations. They don't work particularly well. Crusading over the course of the 12th century becomes very institutionalized and without institutional support is hard to do. You think that this is something that was intentional because, you know, I'm thinking kind of in the first crusade and the unpleasantness around Peter the Hermit, who, for our gentle listeners, Peter the Hermit was a crusading enthusiast, and he went around preaching to ordinary folks about the First Crusade and how glorious it was. And it seems from the documentation, he got some ordinary people to do this.

And then they got as far as Constantinople and we're basically all starving. And the Byzantines were like, please get out of here. We don't like this at all. And they all get massacred, right? So do you think that this is possibly intentional by the time the Second Crusade comes around where they're like, we're not doing it this way? we're getting the fancy lads together and we're going on a boat. Yeah, I think there is an element of that. I think that the way that crusading becomes more of a matter of these big expeditions

and a much higher outlay of cost is kind of gatekeeping. The first crusade and its success had proved a challenge to the legitimacy, or the sole legitimacy, the appropriation of legitimacy for Boyle and upper aristocratic figures because a lot of sort of middling nobility in knights had gone and become basically the heroes of Latin Christendom. And that was potentially threatening that the people of not the very upper ranks could gain so much reputation, so much honour.

And so the whole reframing of crusade in a more royal key in the later half of the 12th century, particularly into the 13th when you get, for example, St. Louis, who is really making his whole deal being a Saint King crusader hybrid, then this is very much an appropriation of crusading away from it. It's more humble roots to a certain extent. I think it's also important to note, though, that with regard to the first crusade,

we're still not talking about peasants. The expedition you allude to with Peter the Hermit is often, or used to be called more frequently, the peasants crusade. And this is simply largely not true. The sources do emphasise that these tended to be somewhat lower-class individuals who participated in it. but we're still talking mostly about knights. This historiographical perception has been fueled by the fact that one of them is called

Walter the Pennyless, but Walter the Pennyless is a translation of Walter Saint-Savois in French. Saint-Savois means without possessions, but it's also the name of the place where Walter came from. So he wasn't penniless, he came from a place called San Savoire. And so we can see that lots of these participants who we can identify were not peasants by any stretch of the imagination. and those that Peter led may have been from slightly different areas. They may not have had the same kudos that the later crusade did, but they were still of the knightly class in the main.

We're not talking about somebody's surf who got up and left, right? No, but it was useful for commentators at the time, and it's been useful for historians since to try and cast these crusaders as lower class because they did a lot of nasty stuff. The first thing that they did was that they were very persecutory towards the Jews in the Rhineland and in northern France. in particular at Ruin. And so this first wave of crusaders

were largely responsible for the pogroms against Jews in 1096, what many scholars have called, quote, and quote, the first Holocaust. Then they ended up getting into fights in Eastern Europe, very nasty confrontations with the Byzantine Empire, which were largely over bad provisioning. They didn't have enough food

and were therefore raiding certain towns in Bulgaria and so on. And so because they were doing raiding, looting and pogroming, it was convenient for contemporaries to dismiss them as guilty by virtue of their lower class. It's been convenient for historians as well. Historians, particularly in the 19th century, you wanted to kind of impose upon the crusade

this idea that nobility behave properly and lower classes were the ones that were responsible for all of this disordered behavior. That's really interesting because I suppose it is really easy for us to say, oh, nobility, this is this chunk of society who has a ton of money and they all behave in one particular way,

but it's a chunk of society where, yeah, they've got more money than some, but actually, I say this, and I'm just thinking, actually, some peasants have a lot of money. There are some peasants who might have more money than the lower nobility, but they aren't allowed to carry a sword, I guess. So that's a really interesting way of thinking about it. So how much money do you need then? What's the dash that you need to kind of come up with in order to make going on crusade feasible? One thing just to mention that is that peasant includes this vast array of different socioeconomic positions. One of the main reason why lots of peasants in the Crusade is because lots of peasants are legally unfree. They are chained to the land.

They cannot leave without the permission of their lord, and he needs them to work the land. So they're not going anywhere. And then the peasants who are free might potentially be at liberty to go, but they need the resources. So in terms of how much money you need, again, it depends on the period. Lots of the people that go on the first crusade are patently, at least according to our accounts, unprepared for what will come. They survive mostly by looting. They survive by, and again, looting is a very loaded. term, but they survived by foraging through other people's land. So it's not as if many people on the First Crusader going in a particularly prepared way with the resources they need, with a few exceptions. And those people who do go with the resources they need are the ones who become the leaders. So Godfrey of Brion, for instance, famously becomes the first ruler of Jerusalem. Arguably, he does

say because he probably leaves Western Europe in the best state financially. He has mortgaged off so much property and he is able to attract and keep a retinue of knights. So the more resources you go with, the better it is for you. By the time we get again, just even to the Second Crusade or the Third Crusade, and particularly from the Fourth onwards, actually, if you can pay for a nicer route to the East, you're more likely to get there. So if you can go by boat, then that's going to work out well for you. The classic example of this is the Second Crusade, where the Royal Army is under the French and German Kings, initially attempt across Anatolia, realize it's really hard

and the Turks are attacking them. And then basically the royal retinue of the French king, hot-footes it across to the coast, gets on some ships and makes it out of there, leaving the vast majority of their army, the kind of lower-class elements of their army, on land to try and make it across Anatolia if they can. And they never do.

So basically, the resources that you need depend very much on the precise circumstances of the crusade. The more money you have, the better. That remains true, I think. What you've kind of alluded to here is if you're a member of the lower nobility, you know, a guy with less money, it's probably going to be a more dangerous journey. And also the king doesn't want you on the boat. Like if you're some guy, you're a super low-level aristocrat that the king doesn't know,

he's not going to say, come on the boat. So that leaves you to walk. And walking has got to be more dangerous because you've got to. go through the Seljuks and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. So the route that you take is very much dependent on the royal patronage is dependent on resources. And that means that by the time we get into the late 13th century, Crusades are essentially royal endeavours. So you may be aware that there are numbered crusades and they go up to, well, it's debatable, right? But there's the Eighth Crusade. And then after that, there is the Ninth Crusade. And is the Ninth Crusade called the Knight Crusade or is it called

Edward's crusade. This is Edward Longshanks, and it is so essentially his thing that you can just name it after him. The Crusades of King Louis in France, they can be called entirely his crusades, Louis's Crusades, or you could give them their number of names. So, yeah, essentially becomes royally appropriated by the 13th century. And it kind of diversifies at the same time as well, and other types of military activities start getting called crusade, but the traditional crusades to the east become very much royally appropriated. In terms of the dangers that more ordinary crusaders were exposed to in crossing over land, it's not just, obviously, the climate, the starvation, but it is, as you alluded to, it's also the threat of Seljuk attacks in Anatolia.

And this is a very, very divided, very fractured country with lots of different competing interests. In Anatolia and in northern Syria, you've not only got Seljuk forces, you've got local city states as well. You've got Armenian and Georgian forces, and all of them are very dangerous cross-through. There's lots of petty rivalries around the time of the First Crusade. The two big cities in Syria, Damascus, rather, and Aleppo, they are at war with each other. And so getting involved in those local politics as you cross through this land, it's particularly dangerous. And so that's why many people prefer to take the boat. And the other thing to say is there's also wild animals. So lots of the crusaders, ordinary crusaders, as far as we can

tell, experience conflicts with wild animals, notably lions and bears, which they haven't seen before, to quite the same extent. Godfrey of Bion, who I'm mentioning for the second time, was famously attacked by a bear in Anatolia, and lots of our contemporary sources record this, and he was very badly wounded by that, rather embarrassingly, because he seems to have stamped himself in the thigh whilst trying to defend himself from the bear. I'm afraid I'm Team Bear. Yeah, Team Bear. The bear did nothing wrong. Sorry, you're in his house, so what can you say?

So what's, if you get to the Near East, you know, you struggle through a bunch of hostile lands, you fought a bear, the Seljuks aren't happy to see you, no one's happy to see you, and here you are in the Near East, right? What's going on at the time? It's not just sitting around and fighting every single Muslim that you see. What do you do once you get there? Well, this is a big quandary. In many senses, the only crusade that is successful in achieving what it sets out to do is the First Crusade.

arguably the later Crusades are more about performative piety, and so they are successful in that way, but they don't achieve their geopolitical objectives. But the First Crusade does, and the First Crusaders are faced with this quandary of what they can do after they have achieved their objectives. They were just trying to retain, recapture Jerusalem, recapture the holy places for their Eastern brothers. And after they get there, many of them are very divided on what they should be doing here. So after the First Crusade, nearly all Crusaders returned home. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, our contemporary sources indicate that there were around 300 knights is the figure that it's always given, 300 knights who stay to set up the Kingdom of

Jerusalem. That's a tiny proportion of the forces that had gone, and it is very tiny in the face of the various polities, the various Islamic states that surround them. And it isn't really enough even to keep order within the towns and cities that the Crusaders have captured. So there's an immediate problem of manpower, which these enhancements, inhabitants of the Latin East immediately tried to fill by encouraging new crusades. And so after the first crusade, there's a crusade in 1101, but people who are taking the bow but then actually not gone through with it. And then there is continual, quote-unquote, crusading activity, which is just people coming to the Latin East and settling? And this raises this kind of interesting question,

which is, is settling in the Latin East, definitionally contributing to crusader status? Are you a crusader because you go to the Latin East and live there and maybe defend yourself. Well, possibly if you took a vow, but lots of people go without taking vows. Lots of people go outside of a papally sponsored expedition. So what are they? And the initial settlement of the Latin East lasts from 1099 through to, although it diminishes in size, 1291. And that is a tremendously long period. These are multiple generations of Latins who are living in the East

and developing their own sort of culture, their own sort of largely hybrid culture, and we can see that in art and architecture, and we see that in the blurring of different ways of life as well. There's a really interesting coin from probably about 1111, which seems to portray a first crusading leader, Tancred, as wearing a turban in governance of his Islamic subjects. Later in the 12th century,

we have many inhabitants of the crusader states who are speaking Arabic, Reynolds of Saiden, very important figure in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, who negotiates with Saladin's emissaries, is fully conversed in Arabic and also trained in Arabic literature. So we see this tremendously complex picture of what we see as crusaders actually not necessarily having those characteristics of just living in the Latin East and trying to form their own way of living, their own polities. Obviously, the polities are rooted in Holy War and still there is always retained an edge of religious warfare. But that's very common in the medieval world more generally to have that underpinning, of religious orthodoxy.

So you've mentioned how these settlers take up some characteristics of the local scene, you know, speaking Arabic, being educated in the same ways. Are they also sort of intermarrying with any of the Muslim people there? Or is a strict dichotomy of these are the Islamic people that I'm ruling and here I am, I don't know, importing brides from the West? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. They are absolutely intermarrying. But in your question, you alluded to the Muslim inhabitants of the Levant.

And in fact, there is a tremendous diversity of people in the Levant. There's so many Eastern Christians, there are Armenians, Georgians, Syriac Christians, of all types, and obviously also Jews. And so this is a very, very complex population to be governing. And there is intermarrying, but there is also this relatively strict hierarchy that is imposed upon these societies. So the Armenians and the Georgians are at the top of the pile, largely because they are seen as more capable of state building, because the Georgian state and the Armenian state as Christian kingdoms pre-exist the crusader states, the Armenians and Georgians are seen as truly civilized people.

And so many of the first crusaders marry Armenians. The first two kings of Jerusalem that are called Baldwin, Baldwin the first and Baldwin the second, both have Armenian wives, Arda and Morphea, respectively. and the great queens and princesses of the mid-12 century, famously Melisand, Alice of Antioch and so on, are half Armenian. Their mother, Morphea, was Armenian.

And so within one generation, you are getting a lot of mixing between Latin Christians and mostly Armenian and Eastern Christian inhabitants of the Levant. In terms of Muslims, it seems as if many kind of upper-class Muslims do not initially want to live within the domains of the. Christian kingdoms. Not particularly, I think, because they consider themselves to be unduly persecuted, but because there are other territories around where their influence might be more significant. So after the Christians have captured Jerusalem, they may very easily go to Damascus or so on.

So I think you see displacement of the Muslim population there to a certain extent. But on the level of peasants, throughout this period, Muslim peasants remain very, very common, and they have their own legal system within the Frankish state. So particularly within the Kingdom of Jerusalem, they have their own legal system and legal redress. It is very much a kind of hierarchically structured society. But there's no displacement of the Muslim population, but they're not given access to intermarrying and to the trappings of power in the same way that the Eastern Christians and Armenians are. So you've got this really stratified society. Do we see a lot of harmonious relationship between the people who have settled there or between various crusaders?

Or are they scrabbling in order to get a place in this pile? It will probably not surprise you, Eleanor, to understand that the Christians in the Latin East had exactly the same problems as the Christians in the Latin West. Division, squabbling over power, are all extremely, extremely common. As you alluded to the hierarchical structure of the Latin East, is not unusual in any way. And so all of those same tensions continue existing in the Latin East, but possibly with added dimensions as well. There seems to be developing, and our main source for this is William of Tyre, who's writing the second half of the 12th century, there seems to be developing tensions between newly arrived crusaders in the middle of the 12th century from the West and those who have been there for a while. And that seems to be a really big tension that underplays lots of the civil discord that predates the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the fall of Jerusalem itself after the Battle of Hatteen.

And so there are definitely tensions that are occurring here. There's squabbles over who is some kind of dominant figure. There are some civil wars. So, for instance, there seems to be periods of civil strife or quasi-ci civil war when there doesn't exist a very clear king of Jerusalem. So King Fulke is imported, basically, from Western Europe to marry Memisand, and they rule together for a while. But it looks as if Falk does not seem to have been very popular among the Lebanese nobility. And so there seems to be something of a civil war, really, like a small one between husband and wife in the 1130s. And then there is,

probably more civil strife when their son Baldwin is coming into his inheritance in the subsequent decade between Melisand and her son. So even within families, there are civil wars, there are squabbles. So there is no sense of united, definitely crusader identity for most of the time. There are moments at which it appears. So after there has been a particularly bad defeat, so after the, for instance, the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, then suddenly there seems to be the sense that there needs to be Christian unity and the various different Levantine's And there's four of them, by the way. So there's the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch. There is Tripoli and there's Odessa, which are both counties. And all of these seem to come together a bit more after the Battle of the Field of Blood, briefly, temporarily. And also after the Battle of Hatten, there seems to be a sense that, okay, maybe we should work together a bit more here. So unity only comes in moments of strife. And most of the time, it's just like the rest of medieval Europe. And lots of people are trying to get ahead of each other. You can take them out of Western Europe, but you can't take the Western Europe out of the Crusaders.

But also the Levant was just the same, like as I mentioned. Look, I don't like it when people say, oh, well, the Middle Ages were so violent because it's not like we aren't. But come on, they do be squabbling. It has to be said. All right. So you've also talked to about, you know, Melisant, these really great queens of the Crusader states that we know about. Do we have women go on crusade? There's, of course, the famous example of Eleanor Vauquitaine, trying to save her marriage and go on crusades.

which doesn't work out well. But do other women go on crusade? And when they do, how are they involved? I mean, what's the sort of role that a woman would have on crusade? I think it's true to say that women do go on crusade quite frequently. Whether women are crusaders or not is very hotly debated. And in fact, much of the kind of early discussion of women on crusade that we see, making the conscious effort to distinguish what they are doing from crusading,

that they are on crusade, but they are not crusaders. They are there as helpers, as assistants in battle. And the famous example is in the First Crusade, women are given this role of bearing water to the warriors on the front. So they're the water carriers. And some of the latest sources about the First Crusade really, really emphasised this. So they have a whole squadron of women who have tied up all of their wimples and so on

and are bearing these kind of amazing jugs of water over to the front lines in their own military squad. but they are definitively not crusaders. They are not fighting. And so there is a really keen determination to make sure that women are not seen as equatable to men. And you see this all over the shop. So you see by the time we get female participation in the Third Crusade, which is quite extensive, the women that are described in the Christian sources are understood as washer women. They are there in one particularly unflattering portrayal in the Estrada la Gersaint. They are there to pick the lice off the men, that the older women were particularly good at lice picking.

So there's all of these kinds of really marginalising and dehumanising discourses about women's participation in crusading endeavours and expeditions. But we can see that they certainly were there. Lots of the texts agree about this. And it makes a certain amount of sense from the Latin Christian perspective as well, because husbands could not just abandon their wives to go on crusade. So there's this concept of the conjugal debt, which means that men and women are entitled within marriage to continue having sex to each other constantly, if they wish to. And so because of that,

it means that a husband departing without his wife's permission before 12-01, from a papal perspective, is entirely illegitimate. So they need their wife's permission. And so lots of wives do obviously end up going with their husbands. And because of what I was mentioning earlier, that there's these whole groups of society that take to the road to go to the east, obviously women are involved in that. This is an expedition that takes multiple years if you're walking. So families go, and we have very moving accounts of how on the First Crusade, Crusader's wives died by the side of the road. There's one particularly moving account of a pregnant woman dying by the side of the road as the crusading army marched on. So we certainly see female participation, but it is always portrayed in such a way as to make it clear that they're not crusaders.

And the exception to that is in Muslim sources. So Muslim sources writing about around the time of the Third Crusade, Bahal Adin and Imad al-Din both talk about how there were women Crusaders fighting. There were these contingents of female warriors. Both of the Muslim sources agree, in fact, during the Siege of Acre in 1191, there is a female archer dressed in a specific type of cloth that they're very excited by, who is posing a massive problem to the Muslim competence. So these Islamic sources are very keen to emphasize that there were female fighters on Crusade. But again, their portrayal is to show the Crusaders as having incorrect models of gender as allowing women to fight when they shouldn't. So it's hard to look past

these portrayals of female participation on both sides, quote and quote, in order to determine what women's actual role in crusading endeavors was. So basically, both sides are here to tell you that there's women there and it's bad. Yeah, in different ways. But yeah, I guess it's interesting that despite that they don't try to minimize or downplay the involvement of women. It clearly was seen as a community effort and one that women would participate in. Lots of the movements from the people perspective in Innocent the Third's papacy are to suggest that women shouldn't go on crusade, but they should still pay for it. They can effectively get the same spiritual benefits as the crusading vow, but by paying for their participation and not going. So paying for somebody else

almost to go as a proxy. So it's not as if crusade can really be conceptually separated from women's involvement in models of piety at this point. So you mentioned that whole families go on crusade. Does that include children? So, you know, there's the whole story from 1212 about the children's crusade. But do we see kids there? Like, do you bring your kids along with you? Okay, broadly, not a good idea to take your kids along. More mouths to feed. And they're not very good at doing anything useful. I say this as a father myself, I think I probably would not want to take my child on crusade. So broadly, people don't want to as a kind of sensible approach, but sometimes they're forced to. Leaving your family back in the West was potentially a dangerous thing to do. There were

provisions that the church would protect families, protect property in exchange for the crusading bow. These often were in perfect agreements and you might expect your family to be in a worse state when you came back than when you left them. We do see examples of families going to the east. and we see this in particular in the First Crusade because it is the one that involves less royal governance. So, yeah, you absolutely do see families going the east. What you don't really see is a children's crusade. So what is referred to as the Children's Crusade

is this movement of popular piety around 1212. And there do seem to be two sort of pockets of enthusiasm for effectively crusading ideals in France and in the Rhineland. and both of these seem to have encouraged a participation of Pueri. So Pueri is the Latin word for boys or children, most often male children. But it can also be understood in the derogatory sense of boy that you get sometimes particularly like the southern US. And it can also be understood as lads. So Puerre could encompass people up to the age of maturity, just of a lower class.

And famously, both of these efforts of Puri to get involved in the Crusaderie movement, There are lots of popular enthusiasm, but they fizzle out before they get anywhere. So the Rhineland expedition does seem to have gathered together a large group of Puelli, and they heads south to Italy, but then they never really heard of again. And most of the myths about these children's crusades serve again a kind of conceptual and ideological function. They're to say, look at the medieval world, look at how ideologically fanatical they were, that even their children thought they could just walk to Jerusalem. How silly.

And in practice, that is just an imposition on the evidence. Like, we do see popular enthusiasm, but that popular enthusiasm probably results in some people wandering somewhere else in their home, realizing Jerusalem is a very, very long way away, and it's going to be impossible to get there, and then going home. So this idea of it is an irrational kind of children's crusade

doesn't really hold up. But it is interesting that by the start of the 13th century, when proper crusade, quote-unquote, has moved into a more royal key, there is still a lot of enthusiasm for the basis, ideas that motivated it earlier. So ideas about redeeming Christ or revenging Christ's death, fighting against the politically dominant infidels. And in 1212, that actually isn't just in Jerusalem. That's also the so-called heretics in the South as part of the Abigensian Crusade. So it ties into this idea of normal people fighting against towards enemies, but that doesn't always find expression

in the form of proper crusades, quote and quote. So I mean, the Children's Crusade could, as easily be like the lads, lads, lads, lads, lads, it could be the lads, lads, lads tour to Italy. Whether you could really call it a crusade, I don't know, is motivated by some of the same ideas, but then quite a lot of medieval societies based in these ideas of piety, of performative suffering, of doing things that aren't really very sensible and wandering far from home.

So pilgrimage is a long-standing tradition that predates crusade and will continue to exist long after it has passed away as well. I guess very last thing I'm going to ask you, say you are one of these lower nobles, you've managed to get to the Holy Land. How do you go home from there? Well, I think the first thing you do is you try to determine whether you want to go home. If you have been away from home for maybe several years and you left Europe for a reason because your economic or social position was not great there,

and had many examples of crusaders who were doing that, maybe you don't want to. Maybe you want to try and make a life out. in wherever you've ended up. That can obviously be in the Levant. It can be increasingly in Spain. It can be in the Baltic. And so settlement is a really viable option. If you do want to go home, then you can just take one of the very many trade boats that preexisted the crusading movement. So it's not as if nobody in Western Europe had ever been to Jerusalem before. They were going on pilgrimage, and many of them were using trade goods that have been being imported through acre,

through Tyre, through Alexandria. So the actual process of getting home, in a non-military guise. There's a lot easier than going in a military guys. So people could easily go home. What would be waiting for them when they got there is another question entirely. Many people do seem to have their rights, possessions, lands trampled on while they are away.

But they came back with this great boon, which is reputation, particularly with the First Crusade that had been so successful. And we see that that reputation enabled them to get away with absolutely kind of horrendous stuff to reclaim their patrimony. There are a number of First Crusaders who have very dubious reputations about how they treated their peasants and how they treated their allies and neighbours when they returned back to the

West, but they always retained their reputation, their honour as crusading heroes. And this helped bolster their reputation, bolster their standing. And this is a world in which reputation is key. A great example of this is Robert Kurthoast, Duke of Normandy. So the normal analysis is that Robert Kurthoast was the slightly pathetic son of the Conquer and that he hadn't really got the nouse of his brothers, William or Henry, and that he was a bit, quote, unquote, simple. But he went away on Crusade, and he came back, not in a great economic position.

He'd lost largely possession of Normandy, he'd mortgaged off Normandy to his brother William before he departed. But he came back with reputation. And that reputation enabled him to gather together his former allies and to challenge his brothers for control of Normandy. And it's quite clear that you could trade in the transactional reputation of being a crusade. for local political advantage. So it wasn't all bleak about going home from Crusade,

but then you might not want to at all. The outcomes of various Crusaders are as diverse as any group within society. They didn't largely come back rich. They really didn't come back rich. Because there's this idea that pragmatic consideration to go on Crusade for adventure, for fame, for renown and so on, would be relying on you coming back loaded with Arabic gold or whatever. And particularly, again, in the 19th century scholars really like to juxtapose

this motivation with proper religious belief. They went for God or they went for gold. And one of the most famous interventions in the 20th century was the crusader story in Jonathan Riley Smith, who looked very closely at the examples of all of the first crusaders and noted that very few of them came back in a good position economically. And so this motive of going on crusade in order to get rich can't really have made a lot of sense for medieval contemporaries. Apart from anything else, movable wealth is very heavy and expensive to transport, people do come back rich in relics and things like that. But again, they're sort of reputational goods. They enable them to show off their reputation as a crusader. But they don't come back loaded with gold or treasure or anything that

enables them to buy back their possessions. So the riches that you get are being able to tell people to shut up and you're just as good as your brothers. Yeah. And of course, spiritual rewards, which are without price. Without price. Absolutely. Well, Simon, you so much for coming and complicating our understanding of the Crusades. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much, as always, for listening, and thank you once again to Simon for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you'd like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email

at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will return to the Gone Medieval Homelands on Friday, and I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.