Gone Medieval - Rise of the Crusader States

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

The Crusader states in the Near East were created after the First Crusade in order to keep hold of the territorial gains made by those known in the region as the Franks - essentially Christians from Western Europe. What can the military activities of the many different factions in the region tell us about how and why those states rose and then fell?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more from Dr. Nicholas Morton, author of The Crusader States and Their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099-1187.This episode was edited by Anisha Deva and produced by Rob Weinberg.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.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.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Crusader states in the Near East represented the early military victories of those known in the region as the Franks, Christians from Western Europe essentially. What can the military activities of the many different factions in that region tell us about how and why those states rose and then fell? I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast, the perfect guest to explore all of this with. Nicholas Morton is an associate

professor at Nottingham Trent University and Nick's book, The Crusader States and their neighbours, a military history 1099 to 1187, is out in paperback now. It's great to welcome you back to gone medieval Nick. Thanks so much. It's great to be on the show. Absolutely wonderful to have you back to talk about a fascinating topic. I'm not sure we've ever really covered the Crusader states in detail. So it's another one of those glaring things that is such a huge topic that we've somehow managed to avoid thus far. Can you just give us a brief overview of what the crusader's states were and how they came into being, please? So in 1095, Pope Urban II launched the first crusade. Its objective was to conquer Jerusalem and various crusading army set out. And when they

reached Alt-Syria and then advanced down south towards Jerusalem, they conquered a series of cities, Antioch, notably, later on Jerusalem. In Edessa 2, the Franks were originally invited into the city. And having conquered these cities, various warriors in the wake of the Crusades decided they were going to stay and use those cities as the nucleus for building out their own territories, essentially their own countries, in the coastal regions of the Middle East. And so in the north, you have the county of Edessa in southern Anatolia, that's all southern Turkey really in modern geography. And then you have Antioch near the coast of the Mediterranean, which became the principality of Antioch. And then further south, following the crusader's brutal

conquest of the city in 1099, Jerusalem became the centre of the kingdom of Jerusalem, which became the largest of the crusader states, as they were known. And a little while later in 1102, one of the first crusade commanders following a subsequent crusade expedition, laid siege to the city of Tripoli, which today is in northern Lebanon, and having conquered the city, that became the centre of the county of Tripoli. So what you've got, basically, is in the eastern Mediterranean, from south to north, you've got three Crusader states, one after the other, and in time they grew large enough that their territories shared borders with each other,

the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the south, county of Tripoli, principality of Antioch, and then to the north-eastern inland, the county of Edessa. Interesting. And do the titles given to those regions relate any kind of seniority? So we've got two counties, a principality presumably ruled by a prince and a kingdom ruled by a king. Does that give us an understanding of the importance of each of those states? In a sense, yes, the kingdom of Jerusalem did ultimately become the most powerful of the four crusader states. And obviously, the title of king is higher than that of count or prince. Having said that, in their early years, that future wasn't written. and the Crusade commanders who founded these territories and their immediate successes were seeking to expand as fast as they possibly could on as many different fronts as possible. It wasn't clear at that point who was going to achieve a senior position among the Crusade Estates. In fact, for a time it seemed that the Principality of Antioch would become more powerful than the Kingdom of Jerusalem further south.

So yes, there are these titles, and it did actually turn out to be that the kingdom was more powerful than the principality, but this wasn't necessarily always written in stone from the early years of the Crusader States. And how long do the Crusader Estates last for? So we know that they will eventually vanish. Roughly how long are they in existence for? So after the First Crusade, all four of the Crusade estates expand rapidly. And their initial objective is to conquer as many port cities as possible. They're thinking being to establish corridors of supply lines going back to Western Christendom,

that can then bring in merchants, settlers, crusaders, the people and resources they need to make their crusader states work. And then they began to strike inland, trying to build out their position in the Middle East. And there they encountered two really big inland cities, Damascus and Aleppo. And conquering these cities posed serious problems for the crusaders, or by this time we should refer to them as Franks, because by this stage former crusaders are now mixed with settlers who hadn't taken a crusading vow. And the reason it's such a struggle for them is that armies of the Crusader States rarely got bigger in this era than about 10,000 troops,

but both Damascus and Aleppo had standing populations around 60,000. So the populations alone made it very hard for them to push inland. They did try. They failed in every attempt, and this sort of marked what I think military commentators call the culmination point. They weren't moving into decline, but they didn't get any further, the sort of high water mark of the Crusader States, and that occurred in the 1120s.

After the 1120s, the Crusader States kept on getting more powerful, but not because they acquired more territory, typically, but largely because they built up their economy, they built up their population base. So in using the territories they had got, they became more sophisticated and more powerful. And they came under increasing pressure in the 1160s with the rise of an empire under the leadership of someone called Nur al-Din,

who ruled Aleppo and Damascus. and subsequently, Noir al-Din's empire was taken over and conquered by Saladin, who initially was Nouraldin's lieutenant in Egypt, but in time, Saladin conquered Nouraldin's territories in Syria as well. And then using Egypt, along with his Syrian territories as well, Saladin was able to bring incredible pressure on the Crusader States until his victory in 1187 over the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which precipitated the dramatic collapse of the Crusader Estates until only a few cities were left. This is the period covered in my book, although it has to be said that this merely began the next round of warfare when a new massive crusade, the third crusade,

led by people like Frederick I of Germany, Philip II of France, and Richard I of England, tried to retake Jerusalem. They failed, but they still conquered some of the former territory of the Crusader States, and the wars of the Crusader States continued for another century, until the eventual destruction of the mainland crusader states in 1291. So we're talking about almost a 200-year period here of a permanent territorial Frankish or Western European or Western Christendom presence in the Middle East, which is a substantial chunk of time.

So it's an interesting topic and one that has quite a long duration. Absolutely. I guess this might be too complex a question to answer in one single podcast episode, but is there a quick way that we can understand, And perhaps just in the beginning, what the impact of planting these new states into an existing political situation in the Near East? What is that impact on the region? Complicated. So a little bit of background on the region that would become the Crusader

estate, so Syria and the north, Palestine, Egypt's affected two parts of Anatolia. And the main point is that about 20 years before the arrival of the Crusade, there is another invasion, which involves the conquest of much of Syria and Anatolia, and that is the invasion of the Seljuk Turks. So a little bit of background on that. In the 900s, so going back quite a bit now, the entire region from the Central Asian step borders in what today would be sort of the southern stands and Persia, all the way across to North Africa was under the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate. But the Abbasid Caliphate became embroiled in infighting in the various regions, went their own independent way, and so the Abbasid Caliphate fragmented geographically. And then after the year

1000, there was a series of massive migratory invasions out of the Central Asian steppe region led by a family called the Seljuks. And the Seljuks conquered Persia, Iraq, and moved into northern Syria as well. And they reached Syria in the 1070s, only about 20 years before the arrival of the crusaders themselves. And the Seljuks conquered all the various dynasties and governors who were ruling the districts of the former Abbasid Caliphate, and the conquest itself could be very violent in many cases, cases some submitted to the Seljuks, some were overthrown, some tried to sort of work out a sort of diplomatic settlement, but nonetheless, the Seljuks invaded and conquered much of the region. And the Seljuks only really encountered significant resistance, resistance that

really held out against them, when they tried to advance towards Egypt. And in Egypt, you have another important empire that arose during the phase in which the Abbasid Caliphate was collapsing. And that is the Fatimid dynasty. The Fatimid is a Shia Muslim dynasty, and it controlled much of Syria and Egypt. And the Seljuks tried to invade Egypt, but they weren't successful. And so the region between Jerusalem and Damascus, for about 20 years, became a frontier of war between the Seljuks advancing out of the east and the Fatimids centered in Egypt. So the region itself is already a war zone. The Seljcet also tried to invade into Anatolia, which at this point was the eastern district of the Byzantine Empire. But of course,

the Byzantine Empire is the direct line continuator of the Eastern Roman Empire. So there's a lot of warfare going on. The Seljuks trying to expand their empire, the Fatimids showing resistance in Egypt, the Byzantine position very much in retreat in Anatolia. And then, just because it's not complicated enough, the Crusaders arrive. That's what the situation really needs, isn't it? A bunch of Franks turning up and thinking we can add to the complications here. Quite. So this is the world in which the Crusaders have to sort of adjust themselves, really. And during the First Crusade, the Crusaders spend a long time negotiating the possibility of an alliance with the Fatimids in Egypt against the Seljuks. So it's rarely as simple as just being sort of

crusaders on one side and then other powers or Muslim powers on the other. Often it's much more complicated with various different factions in orbit doing deals or rivalries or diplomacy with each other. But in the course of the First Crusade, the armies of the First Crusade defeated nearly every Seljuic Field Army in the region, and that included the Field Armies of Damascus, Aleppo, Missouri, and Anatolia. So the Seljuks find themselves on the back foot, and that means that many local communities who had previously seen no possible way of resisting the Seljuks rose up in rebellion against them. So part of the reason why the Seljuks can't defeat the Crusaders, even when the first Crusaders, for the most part, went home. Part of the reason for that is because they're facing internal troubles themselves.

That is then compounded by a big civil war within the Seljuks Sultanate following the death of the previous Sultan Malik Shah. And so there's a big civil war in addition to these rebellions. So the Crusaders have to accommodate themselves to this. They benefit from it, of course, because there are all these internal dividing lines that they can benefit from. So they initially looked to ally with the Fatimids, but in later years they also ally with other groups or one side of existing arguments within the ongoing wars within the Seljuk Sultanate, because they can see the benefit for doing so. So very rapidly, the entire region becomes very, very complicated with all sorts of different

factions. You look the big ones, the Seljuk Turks and their various governors, Fatimid Empire, the Crusaders, but you've also got Kurdish communities, the Bedouin, the Byzantines, Armenian groups, and they've all got their own agendas, and there's all sorts of alliances, and it's not always the case that you have Christians on one side of the battlefield, Muslims on the other, and then they fight. It's very common to have Christians and Muslims on both sides in different configurations, depending on the way in which the political situation is unfolding. So, like I said, it gets complicated pretty quickly. Yeah, we often imagine that

this whole period in that region is about the clash of Christianity, with Islam, but it's clear that there are political dimensions to this on both sides, too, that are feeding in, because you can imagine a world in which the Christians would arrive, the Franks would arrive, and that would heal over these riffs in the region and bring them all together to see the Christians off, but that clearly isn't what happens. The Christians are able to get into those fault lines and cause more trouble, and I guess that to some extent leads to their early success. That is certainly something that benefits them considerably in their early years. And yeah, there is undeniably an underlying conflict. And there's

plenty of commentators who will cheer when the representatives of their religion, as they see it, conquer a town belonging to or previously ruled by a rival religion. So there is that underlying conflict, but it is a great deal more complicated. Just to give an example, in 1108, there are two crusader states that are rivals to one another, the county of Odessa and the principality of Antioch, and there are two rival Seljuk contenders to rule Aleppo in northern Syria. And so what they do is they simply form alliances based on their lines of interest. And so you have one Turkish faction allying with one Frankish faction

against their rivals, another Frankish faction and another Turkish faction. And they fight, because in the context of their own interests, that actually makes sense. But it's certainly a great deal more complex than simply Christian territory here, Muslim territory here,

and then there's a conflict between them. It gets a lot more complicated very quickly. Does that amount of different factions and different cultures, I guess, does that lead to, a mixture of different military tactics being played out in the region too. Does that give us lots of different angles in which this war is approached by the different factions? Yeah, it's a great question. So one of the things I find really interesting about the military history of this region is how

the various different commanders adapted to one another's tactics. And so the basic scenario is this, where you've got various forms of army, you've got the Fatimid Empire, which has various contingents drawn from different groups. So you've got Armenian archers, Berber-like cavalry, Bedouin cavalry, Turkish mounted archers, and that forms the Fatimid Empire's army. You got the Franks, and they rely very heavily on formations of very heavily armored cavalry, as well as supporting contingents of infantry, including crossbowmen and arches and people carrying big shields to ward off archery attack. And then you have Turkish forces. and these are comprised almost exclusively of mounted arches in very large formations.

These are three of the most common types of army. There are others, but to stick with those, it's interesting to see how people adapted. And so, for example, what Turkish commanders tended to do is they recognised very quickly that the Franks battle-winning tactic is the heavy cavalry charge. So their tactics depended heavily on trying to find ways of defeating that particular challenge. and so we have an example of a commander called Balak. And when he wants to confront a group of heavy cavalry from Odessa, he led them on a long pursuit.

So he fell back before them. They advanced, they advanced, he fell back, he fell back, until he crossed an area of marshland, which his cavalry could cross because they were all fairly light, but where all the Frankish cavalry sank. So that's one way he used to deal with it. And then Saladin devised quite an interesting way. Actually, it wasn't Saladin.

It was his uncle Shurker. and what he did was to present a Frankish army with the kind of target a Frankish army would want to see. A formation of his own troops lined up, just ready for a heavy cavalry charged impact into it. But what he had done is to prepare it so that when the Frankish Heavy Cavalry charged, he simply divided his ranks and then the Frankish cavalry then charged helplessly through the middle. And having charged through the middle, he then waited for the charge to lose its impetus, and then he staged his own attack on them when they were stationary. So these are a few tactics used by Turkish commanders,

or in Saladin's case, Kurdish commanders against the Franks. The Franks themselves adapted very quickly. They realized that their opponents, often Turkish commanders, had advantages in speed and archery, which they lacked. And so they began to conduct a lot of their operations at night. And so whilst they might struggle to get to grips with their opponents, in daylight because Turkish light cavalry simply get out of their way,

what they would do is to march through the night, sometimes 20 or 30 miles, and then at first light, before their opponents had a chance to form, they would charge straight into their encampment before they had a chance to deploy themselves for battle. And that's a way of getting round their opponent's strengths. Another thing the Franks did was to deploy their cavalry and infantry in a very tight formation, a little bit like a really big Roman tortoise formation with cavalry at the centre, an outer shell of infantry with crossbows and shields to keep off enemy attacks. And the idea was that in this fighting march formation, as it was known,

they would advance towards their opponent until the opportunity emerged when their infantry could pull back and the cavalry would charge through the gap and try and win a battle that way. So all these different approaches reflect adaptations to their opponent's strengths in battle. And it's interesting to see how this played out. And it's also reflected in the armaments chosen. So increasingly, Turkish forces began to equip themselves with massive double-handed maces.

And the reason they did that is because edged weapons, like swords or lances, just weren't piercing the Frank's heavy double-thickness chain mail. But a mace doesn't matter whether you're wearing armour or not much, because the mace isn't trying to cut through flesh and bone, is to send shockwaves into an opponent's body, and those will go straight through armour, so it makes sense to use that kind of weapon. And by return, the Franks equipped themselves increasingly

with crossbows and they actually hire light cavalry archers in an attempt to reflect and combat their opponent's strengths in warfare. So it's an ongoing evolution of all sides learning from each other, trying to pick out strategies and tactics that will give them the tactical edge in battle. I was going to slightly flippantly suggest that it's like a giant game of rock-paper-cissors where everyone's trying to find the tactic that defeats the other one on any given day in any given situation, but it's perhaps more accurately some kind of medieval arms race. Essentially,

they're all just going as fast as they can to develop new weapons and new tactics to outdo the opposition and to fit the needs that they find themselves surrounded by. Yeah, and you see this in siege warfare too. There's been some very good research recently on crusader castles. And it's easy to see crusader castles as sort of, well, they've got walls, they've got a moat, they've got gates, just like any other castle. Actually, the actual architecture of these castles has been very, very specifically chosen to combat the anticipated siege tactics of their opponents. And so when the Franks built their castles,

they knew that their opponents would typically be armies under Turkish command, and they knew that their opponent's advantages lay in undermining, particularly. So the standard way of taking a crusader castle for many Turkish and Kurdish rulers was first of all to line up tens of thousands of archers and to conduct an arrow storm into the opposing castle. And the purpose of the arrowstorm is not to be decisive. It's to clear the battlements of defenders and to prevent the defensive arches

and defensive siege weapons from responding. And once they've done that, miners then get to work at the wall's foot, digging down under the wall, trying to undermine it, creating a breach, and then the assault troops go in. And so Crusader castles were specifically designed to thwart just those tactics. And so increasingly, the builders of Crusader castles widened the base of the walls and thickened the walls. So rather than being, say, in English castles where walls are rarely more than a meter or two thick, Crusader castles could be six to eight metres thick.

And at their base, they could be wider still because it's much harder to undermine a wall that's just that thick. and again where English castles might have one or two arrow slits in well-chosen locations, Crusader castles have entire shooting galleries, where for entire stretches of the wall, there is one arrow slit for every metre of the wall, and that point there being to offer as much defensive firepower as possible, so when those arches try and suppress the defenders, there's actually a great deal of ammunition and projectiles coming the other way.

And even behind the walls, sometimes mounted on the walls, there is spaces for heavier weapons like trebouches and heavy crossbows. Again, because the Franks know that much is decided in that initial archery duel. And if they lose that archery duel, the miners will get to work at the Wall's base. So it's interesting to look at the architectural evolution here and see how carefully they are addressing themselves to the siege tactics used against them. And the same can be said looking at this from the perspective of other societies across the entire region, how they adopted architectural practices that were specifically designed to deal with different forms of warfare.

So in many cases, many Muslim governors or commanders used Greek fire extensively because they know that the Franks didn't prefer undermining. They preferred to use massive siege towers, which of course being made from wood are liable to be burnt. And so they began to develop their capacities in that area too. So again, yes, there's a great deal of learning. There is a degree of arms race to this whole process. And how significant were sieges in comparison to those big set-piece open battles that are perhaps more famous? So I'm thinking something like the siege of Damascus. How important was something like that to the wider conflict in the region?

The Middle East viewed from a strategic perspective is dominated by big cities, the classic ones being Cairo, Aleppo, Damascus, Antioch, the coastal ports. There are some other smaller towns that are really important like Shizar or Homs or Hammer. And so possession of those locations could be very, very important. And really winning a battle or losing a battle, that could really only provide a sort of starting point for a subsequent assault on the city itself. And having crunched the numbers on this,

I've looked at the number of battles fought and won by the various different factions in the Middle East. And what's interesting is that battles tend to be won and lost by the various Turkish factions of North Syria and the Franks of the Crusader States, they've done a lot on about the same level. They've got about 50-50 chance going each way of winning or losing. But nonetheless, the Franks are still on the back foot for the most part, and the reason for that is that their armies are so slow-moving.

If they win a battle, the chance of them making significant territorial gains is not great, because their army is impeded with wagons and infantry, and then when they get to a city that they want to siege, they've got to build a siege tower that will often take as much as two months to build, by which time they've lost the initiative, a new army has been raised, and they're forced to retire. So Franks can win battles, but they're not very good at maximising their benefit from those battles. Turkish armies, on the other hand, are much more effective. They are about as likely as the Franks at winning battles, but if they do win battles, they're all mounted,

so they can move much faster, and they can really maximize their benefits much more effectively. and crucially because they use undermining and an archery bombardment, they can get inside the walls much more quickly, sometimes as quick as a week. We've even got one account of them getting into a major town in a single night. And it's that speed at siege tactics. That means that when they win a battle, they can benefit from it far more effectively than the Franks. And that goes some way to explaining why in the long run. And all of this is despite the fact that you have plenty of occasions where you have Turkish forces and Frankish forces on both sides as well as other factions too. In the long run, the Frankish war machine is actually less effective than many of their principal

neighbours. Because really it's all down to control of cities and that's what they never quite get as good at. Yeah. It's a lot slower, Frankish siege tactics. Yeah. So if we bring ourselves up towards the end of the period covered by your book, which kind of cuts off in 1187, with Saladin arriving and having his huge significant victory, at the Battle of Hattin. What leads to that victory for Saladin? What tactics has he developed to counter the Franks is, I guess, what I'm getting at? So even before the battle's been fought, there are serious factors in play. I mentioned before the Crusader States' territorial expansion

ended in the 1120s, but its economic expansion and population expansion continued right the way up to the 1180s. So at its height, the Kingdom of Jerusalem can deploy an army of about 20,000 troops, which by contemporary standards is massive, that is very much comparable with the armies that could be deployed by the Empire of Germany, for example, or the Kingdom of France, which are geographically substantially larger than the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the reason for that is just the sheer amount of economic development that's taken place in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, coupled with the population growth as well. On the other side of the battlefield, you have Saladin's forces. And Saladin initially began his career as a lieutenant to his master Nur al-Din, and he

contributed to the conquest of Egypt. Now, Egypt's important because Egypt is financially the most powerful and wealthiest part of the entire Middle Eastern region. And so by being in control of Egypt, Saladin had resources, financial resources, on a scale that really no one else did in the entire area. And then when he conquered Syria in the 1170s, 1180s, he acquired Syria. He acquired, access to very, very large communities of Turkish-like cavalry. And so putting together substantial wealth with the ability to recruit enormous numbers of troops, that enabled him to field armies of up to 30,000 strong. So he did have a slight numerical advantage. It's not enough for the battle to be inevitable, but he enters into that final battle with a substantial army that is slightly

larger than the Frankish army, and that's a result of his economic and empire building in that previous years. But on the battlefield itself, Saladin proves to be very innovative in his choice of tactics. He spent a lot of time in the years before this battle, a Battle of Hatin, as it was known, developing his own heavy cavalry. So when he encountered Frankish knights, he had his own mounted cavalry that could meet them on something approaching an equal level. He also made use of other tactics that he knew would work, perhaps most importantly the use of fire. So the Battle of Hatin took place in July. The battlefield itself.

It has a fair amount of undergrowth. It's not desert as it's presented in Kingdom of Heaven, the film showing the battle at least briefly. And so he set fire to the undergrowth and, of course, in July, fighting against Frankish knights on big sweaty horses, wearing thick armor. You know, this will exacerbate the heat and their dehydration. And he manages to trap the Frankish army in an area where there's limited water. And so he really is using very effective tactics. He's positioning himself very well, and all that goes some way to explaining why ultimately it wasn't just a victory. It was a overwhelming victory, Saladin's forces in the battle.

I'm still just reeling from your suggestion that Hollywood got something wrong in a film in the medieval world. I mean, you know, it's a terrible thing that should be ashamed of myself, yeah. How significant was that victory by Saladin there? You mentioned it isn't just a victory, it's a crushing win. How significant is that in the fall of the Crusader states? So we know they'll continue to exist for another hundred years, but is this the end of any hope that they will be permanent or that they'll grow? Okay, so in order to meet Saladin on anything like equal terms,

the Kingdom of Jerusalem had to raise the biggest army at its disposal, which basically meant that anyone who could bear arms was sent to join that army. And the Frankish population of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is quite slender anyway. And so with the annihilation of that army, and given the kingdom itself isn't that big. In fact, one medieval commentator said it's more the size of a duchy or a barony rather than a kingdom. There's no geographical depth. They can't withdraw and regroup.

And there's no second line of defence either. And so as a result, Saladin's forces are almost unencumbered. As they advance into the kingdom of Jerusalem, the garrisons have been pared down in order to raise the army that was defeated at Hattin. And so cities and strongholds fall very quickly until, within a year of his victory at Hatin, Saladin has conquered the entirety of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, with the exception only of a handful of the larger fortresses and one city. That's the city of Tyre. His forces have also moved north and substantially reduced, the county of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch,

which are the two other remaining crusader states by this point. So yeah, the losses for the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Crusader states are substantial. And for Saladin, of course, this is an enormous victory and a great triumph over the Franks, but of course it also triggers a counter-reaction, which is the third crusade, launched by a whole range of European monarchs, and they then staged their own campaign into the Middle East as a great deal of fighting, and it ends in the partial rebuilding of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but not Jerusalem itself. And then that's a situation that carries on, as you say, for over a hundred years. The crusader states rebuild themselves somewhat, largely because following Saladin's death, his brother and his sons occupy themselves with infighting for many

decades. In fact, the infighting among Saladin's family lasts for almost 60 years until the eventual collapse of Saladin's dynasty. So in that window of opportunity, the Crusader States are rebuilt somewhat. But then by this day, the political environment's changing. You've got the arrival of the Mongols and people like that. So that then brings in a very different kind of world. In some ways, I guess it's slightly remarkable that the Crusader states do. hang on by their fingernails for a whole another century effectively. That could easily have been swept away off the board. And I guess it's just that reinforcement from Europe that props them up however impermanently and however vulnerable they still are. They are just kept going because I guess

they're symbolic of something that people don't want to let go off by this point. There's plenty of people who want to go on a crusade to the Middle East. There's plenty of people who want to settle in the Middle East. So there is substantial migration to the Middle East from Western Christendom, people who want to either follow. farm or fight for the Crusader States. That's one thing that enables them to survive for longer. Another is that the region itself is economically very valuable. There's a lot of items and products and crops, particularly sugar in that region, are very, very valuable for trade. And the region is intersected by the Silk Roads, as China and Central Asia crossing at the Middle East until they get

to the Mediterranean. And also the spice routes, which then reach the region either through the Red Sea or through the Persian Gulf. And a lot of Italian cities, among other merchants, are very interested in becoming involved in that trade. And the Franks of the Crusader States work very hard to build up their port facilities and other infrastructure to encourage trade, all of which provides an economic basis for what they're doing. It also has to be said that, as I've mentioned, it's a very fractured political landscape in the Middle East at this time. The Franks often find that there are plenty of people who are willing to ally with them, and so they are not friendless in the region. There are various Eastern Christian communities, particularly the Armenians, but also some Muslim

communities, too, including some Bedouin communities, who are also willing to support the Franks, not necessarily consistently, but enough for it to be an important factor throughout this time. There's also another group which might be of interest, which is the Nazaris, who are often known by their nickname, the assassins. They're intensively persecuted in the... the Seljuk Empire. And so in the 1120s, they actually seek refuge in the Crusader states. And there too, a new relationship is developed. It's not always friendly in later years between the Nazaris or assassins and the Franks, but nonetheless, again, there are various groups out there that are willing to work with the Franks provided their interests align.

Such a fascinating and complex picture. And the book does a great job of examining the military activities of all of the various factions from all of those different angles and all of those competing motivations. What do you think factoring in all of those different sides, drivers, tactics, how does that inform our understanding of what happens in the Middle East and the Near East over that kind of 100 year period that the book covers? If you'll allow me a slight digression on this one. Always. We love a digression. This is part of the reason why I find the Middle East in this era to be so fascinating. We've already talked about how on a military plane, there's all sorts of sharing of ideas, there's mercenaries crossing every single conceivable cultural boundary in pursuit of pay,

mercenaries from various different backgrounds. There are tactics and architectural features that are being shared and exchanged and borrowed from the various different factions, but this in itself is a reflection of the wider environment in which they're operating. There are examples of commerce between the various different regions. And so, for example, while the Crusader States fight many wars against Damascus and Aleppo, at the same time, all those regions are tied to one another by trade. Both Damascus and Aleppo need the ports of the Crusader States to get their products and products passing through their cities to the Mediterranean trade. By extension, the Crusader states need the caravans and goods from Aleppo and Damascus to bring their goods so that they can then be

sold in their major port cities. So they exist in a symbiotic relationship, economically speaking. So again, another layer of complexity and at a cultural level, it seems very likely that professionals, and by professionals, I mean people like falconers or carpenters or stonemasons or intellectuals or doctors, there's plenty of examples of people moving across the region in search of employment. I mean, after all, if the Emir of Damascus wants to build a palace, fine, he will have that palace built, but to get that workforce he'll need, he will often draw upon specialists from across the entire region. And in the same vein, when he's built that palace and run out of money, because rulers in this era don't have the resources to keep a workforce on permanently,

it's perfectly possible that the Prince of Antioch, or the ruler of Cilician Armenia, or the Byzantines, or the Fatimids, or whoever it may be, may then think, okay, I want to build some walls to my city. And so that workforce will then cross over to where they're needed, because, of course, they need employment. And so there's a great deal of sharing that's going on, ideas, technologies. Through this era, all sorts of technologies are both being devised in the region and passing through it. Gunpowder arrives seemingly via the Mongols in the 13th century. Paper proliferates just before the crusading period, although also within it as well. There's all sorts of military innovations. There's a great study by Mike Fulton on the counterweight trebushet,

And he shows that the counterweight Trebouchet emerged in both Frankish and Saladin's armies almost simultaneously. And it seems very likely to me that the reason for that is that all the armies in the region have access to the same siege engineers because they're hireable. And so there's so much being shared. And all of this contributes to an environment which is characterized by hatred and rivalry and friendship and ideas being shared and different languages and. different cuisines and different religious groups, and it's all happening. And it's not always nice, although there are moments when there are plenty of positive relations to, but it's just the complexity and the diversity and vibrancy of all these different connections, all happening in a small geographical space. That's for me, at least, why I find the region so fascinating.

I often say if I could go back in time, just to be there in one of these big cities like Damascus or Acre or Jerusalem, and just to hear the voices and the languages and to see the interactions and what people make of each other and how they relate to each other. It must have been absolutely fascinating, although I'm not in any way playing down the fact that there is a great deal of brutality and violence that's taking place as well. Yeah, I mean, you paint a wonderful picture there of the reasons why this period in this region is just so fascinating and also the reasons why people should go and buy your book and learn a lot more about it. Thank you. Thank you very, very much for joining us, Nick. It's been wonderful to talk to you.

My pleasure. You can get Nick's book, The Crusader States and Their Neighbours, a military history 1099 to 1187, for more on this complex and fascinating web of relationships and rivalries, and it's out in paperback now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from, and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

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