Pints With Aquinas - Thank God for the Crusades! (Dr. Thomas Madden) | Ep. 568

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Dr. Thomas Madden, Professor of Medieval History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, sits down to set the record straight on the Crusades. Demystifying one of history's most misunderstood chapters. Dr. Madden draws on 30 years of scholarship and archival work to trace the full arc of the Crusades from their origins in centuries of Muslim expansion to the catastrophic Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople. Whether you think the Crusades were an act of aggression, piety, or geopolitical chaos, this conversation will challenge what you thought you knew. Ep. 568 Dr. Thomas Madden's book "The Concise History of the Crusades" is available here: https://a.co/d/0jjYdCFm - - - Today's Sponsors: St. Paul Center - Join the Bible Study movement alongside a global community. Sign up today at https://stpaulcenter.com/pints PreBorn - Make a difference for generations to come. Donate securely online at https://preborn.com/PINTS or dial #250 keyword 'BABY' Good Ranchers - Subscribe and get $100 off over your first three orders when you use code PINTS at https://GoodRanchers.com  Charity Mobile - Visit https://charitymobile.com/MATTFRADD to get started. Shopify - Sign up for your $1-per-month trial and start selling today at https://Shopify.com/pints - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: ⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe⁠⁠ 🍿 The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is now streaming exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/ThePendragon - - - 📕 Get my newest book, Jesus Our Refuge, here: https://a.co/d/bDU0xLb 🍺 Want to Support Pints With Aquinas? 🍺 Get episodes a week early and join exclusive live streams with me! Become an annual supporter at 👉 ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mattfradd.locals.com/support⁠⁠⁠⁠ - - - 💻 Follow Me on Social Media: 📌 Facebook: https://facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://instagram.com/mattfradd 𝕏 Twitter/X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/Pints_W_Aquinas⁠⁠⁠ 🎵 TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://tiktok.com/@pintswithaquinas⁠⁠⁠ 📚 PWA Merch – ⁠⁠⁠https://dwplus.shop/MattFraddMerch⁠⁠ 👕 Grab your favorite PWA gear here: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com - - - Privacy Policy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.dailywire.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I think if there had never been a crusade, all of Western Europe would have been conquered by Islamic powers. It was clearly the work of God. The First Crusade was constantly teetering on the edge of utter disaster, and yet it was miraculously successful. What about the Christian priests and monks and nuns, and what was their general attitude towards these crusaders? There was no one who disagreed that this was a righteous thing to do.

Every crusade or every major crusade that was launched or enacted was a response to a threat. Right. If a knight wanted more money or land, he could just attack his neighbor. Why march thousands of miles deep into enemy territory into a world that you don't understand or know to do that? Who were the Knights Templar? They wanted to devote their lives to protecting pilgrims. There were no nation states. They didn't have nationalism back then. But it was the same feeling that you are part of something bigger than yourself.

And it's being attacked. Dr. Thomas Madden, thank you very much. for coming on the show. Yeah, it's my pleasure. For those at home, you are a medieval historian. That's right. Professor of medieval history, also the director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at St. Louis

University. How long have you taught? Ooh. For about 30 years. Yeah. A little over 30 years. I've taught undergraduates, but also most of my career has actually been teaching doctoral students.

So there's all kinds of medieval professors around who were my students. But now, but I much prefer, and it's more fun to actually, to teach the undergraduates, to actually talk about the actual history. The problem with graduate students is they know everything already. You're teaching them how to be an historian, the basic skills of doing medieval history as a profession. So it's good, but it's very different. So you've been teaching for 30 years, you said?

Yeah. I started in 1992. So what got you interested in medical history? Yeah. Honestly, I think it was because I wasn't really good at anything else. I had originally planned to be an astrophysicist, and I went to college thinking that I would. And I just wasn't, you know, you have to have that something in your brain that just clicks, and I didn't have it. And so, but I couldn't face being what I really was, which was a bartender, essentially.

And so I tried to think of something else to do. And I had taken a class in history, which I knew nothing about. Having gone to Catholic schools in the 70s, I was really never taught anything about the history of the church or the history of even Western civilization. And I took a Western civ class and I was just entranced. And I thought, I like this. I'll just stick with it. And then the medieval part really came because I became a name. It was one event, a crusade, the fourth crusade, mainly because I read about it in a one-paragraph synopsis, and I thought, that's the most bizarre thing I could possibly imagine. How the heck did that happen?

And I pretty much spent much of my career trying to figure that out. I've written several books about it. It's a bizarre event. I can't wait to get to it. Yeah. So that really kind of sucked me in to doing medieval history. I went to graduate school and I wanted to study that, which then brought me to Venice, the history of Venice. So I began studying. I do my archival work mostly in Venice. And that was, you know, when I became a junior professor at St. Louis University, that's what I was doing. Then 9-11 happened. And I was really the only active historian in America who had published anything about Crusades. everyone else was either very old and retired or they were overseas and most journalists didn't want to talk to someone overseas

that was extra long distance and they didn't want to work out the time difference so everyone started calling me and so I just did hundreds of interviews about the Crusades and I kind of got pulled into the rest of the Crusades in the after 9-11 period I wrote some I wrote a piece for National Review immediately afterwards about how everything that people are saying about the Crusades is wrong and that they need to actually look at the history of the Crusades. Were you a faithful Catholic as you were looking into studying to teach medieval history?

I mean, I was raised Catholic. By the time, like many people, by the time I had gone to college, I had kind of drifted away looking for something, not really sure what. And, but it was really, it was really learning the history as I, as I went to classes and, and as this history of the West was revealed to me, the more I, you know, I learned about it, the more fascinating I became. And then watching the Catholic Church through the centuries, I mean, my church, watching what it did through the centuries, just, I found it absolutely fascinating. But I knew nothing about it. I remember, this was a university of New Mexico, it was a public school. But I remember when we got up to the Reformation and they were explaining what the disputes were about, theologically.

I didn't know which was which. I mean, is faith alone necessary for salvation or not? And I had no idea what the answer was. But as soon as they told me the Catholic side, I was like, that makes sense. And so that's, it was, in a real way, it was the majesty of the church's history that, that kind of drew me back in and seduced me, really. And once I was drawn back in, then I became much more into the fullness of the truth, but also the fullness of the faith and living the faith. So it was very much history that brought me back into it. And I can't recommend it enough. I think most Catholics are afraid to study history because they think, I think for the average Catholic, the history of the church is kind of like, there's the early church.

You got Jesus and the apostles and all of that. That's good. Then you have the Acts of the Apostles. That's good. Then there's about 15 centuries of burning people at the stake and torture, and then Vatican II. And you don't want to look at anything in between Vatican II and the Acts of the Apostles. But in fact, that's not what Catholic history is. And the more you study it, the more, I mean, you'll find all kinds of mistakes because humans are fallible. But the more you study it, the more you see really the hand of the Holy Spirit as it moves through the centuries. I mean, if you think of just something simple, like Catholics believe that the Holy See is protected from error, that's an audacious thing to believe. for an institution not to make an error in its core mission, which is faith and morals, over

centuries? I mean, look at the United States. People make mistakes all the time. I mean, how many times has the Constitution been amended? It's normal. But yet through 2,000 years of history, no Pope has ever had to say, you know, the Pope before me, what he preached, that was completely wrong. Under specific limited circumstances, too, we should say that that teaching is protected America.

Right. Yeah. Now, you can have, they're a fallible man. They can make all kinds of mistakes, but they've never promulgated a fact, which all of the other patriarchates and bishops all did. The patriarch of Constantinople regularly taught heresy and then would have to come back while the popes always stood the line on orthodoxy. And that's exactly what Jesus promised, that you could rely on that rock as the basis of the faith. I think when the, I'd love to hear your take on this. I think when the average person, maybe they're Catholic, maybe they're not, but they don't know a lot about history, perhaps like myself, definitely like myself, here's about the Crusades. They've been told this lie. Perhaps it's a lie. Perhaps it's not. That's why you're here.

That there were these peaceful Muslims who, and that the crusades were an offensive attack against them because they were greedy and wanted to steal from them. and dominate them. I think that's one thing people believe. I think is it, Kingdom of Heaven was that movie? Yeah. I think the other thing is if somebody says, because of the Crusades were awful,

if you were to just say to them, oh, which one? I think that's enough to expose the ignorance. A lot of us don't even know that there was more than one or two or three or four. All right, so what's your sense? What do most people think of when they think of the Crusades

who haven't studied history? Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. The common myth is that they are essentially kind of a medieval colonialism, that it's a bunch of oftentimes thought of basically booty hungry knights who got tired of fighting each other. And the church sent them off to kill as many Muslims as they could and take their lands and colonize those areas. I think most people don't think much beyond that. the facts of course are completely different. That caricature of the Crusades, it's fairly new like most of these are.

It comes out of the 18th century, 17th century enlightenment ideas. These kinds of enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and later Gibbon, who are, who they see the church as essentially a racket. It's something that is enslaving either simple minds or using the very greedy people who are then using this to create their own wealth, their own power, and expand it. And so the Crusades fit into that. By the 19th century with Marxism, then that would also fit pretty well, too, because then they said, well, this was the expansion of Europe had. was expanding in a colonialist imperialist way.

And the fact is, is that the crusades were a completely medieval phenomenon that had nothing to do with colonialism. They had nothing to do with any of the things that I just said. They were, in essence, they were a response to centuries. By the time they were, but by the time they took off, more than five centuries of Muslim expansionism, in which two-thirds of the old Christian world had already fallen. It was already captured by Muslims.

So at some point, quite apart from the church, at some point Christianity as a faith, but also as a culture, either defended itself or it was completely subsumed by Islam. And the Crusades were that defense. They were the attempt to, now, canonically, and as far as the faith goes, there's much more to them than that. But they were always a defensive action. Every major crusade was called in reaction to an attack by...

So key. I'm sure you've said it's a million times and perhaps you take it for granted, perhaps, but this is such a key point that every crusade or every major crusade that was launched or enacted was a response to a threat. Right. Okay. And it not only was a response to, you know, someone attacking Christians in Christian territory, but it would be to write that wrong, to restore those lands that had been taken, Christian lands that had been conquered, and to restore them either to the original Christian rulers or to at least restore it to the Christian faith. So that's how they were understood as they were being done. That's why, Also, the other common misconception is that crusaders, that these men joined the crusades so that they could get rich. So they could, you know, get a lot of booty. They could get some lands for themselves. And this was commonly thought for quite a long time, particularly in the 19th century and even the early 20th century.

Since then, crusade historians have, over the last 60, 70 years, have enormously, investigated the materials that are available, that these crusaders left. Their charters that they left, how they prepared before they went, the sermons that were delivered to them. We know so much more now about that world and how crusading fit within it. And the fact is, they went, all you have to do is think about it. If a crusader, if a knight wanted more money or land, he could just attack his neighbor.

That's what they usually did. Why march thousands of miles deep into enemy territory into a world that you don't understand or know to do that? It doesn't make any sense. And given the fact that the casualty rates on the Crusades were around 50 percent, I mean, that's an enormous. And then we leave aside the fact that they had to pay for. for it themselves. The average crusader, we now know, the average crusader would spend two to three times their annual income to go on, even a short crusade.

So that's why it took them so long. Once they took the vow of the cross, they would spend, you know, a year or more trying to collect the money they needed and the resources that they would need on the march. And also, crusades were horrible for booty. Any booty that they got, which was not much, any that they did get was more than spent on the trip. And finally, the idea that they were going there to create a kingdom for themselves, the first crusade, the idea was to capture these territories and give them back to the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. It was not to stay. those that stayed in the events they ended up having to

but those that stayed it was considered to be an enormous sacrifice because they had lands and family back home and to stay there and administer these territories that was considered quite a big thing well over 90% more like 95, 96% of crusaders who went on crusade went home if they've lived They didn't want to stay. And we can see this from their letters to where they talk about how much they want to go home.

They want to fulfill their vow and go home. So they're not doing it for that reason. They're doing it for what the great crusade historian Jonathan and Riley Smith from Cambridge, great man, actually a convert to Catholicism later in his life. But he argued and was able to demonstrate that what he called. of pious idealism. And what he meant by that was that these warriors, they were very, very conscious of the fact

that they were sinful men. And they knew, because of what they did for a living, that they would have a very difficult time getting into heaven. And so, and they knew, they would often give pious donations. to try to help their souls, particularly to monasteries. But they knew that they could ask God for forgiveness and through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that they would be forgiven for their sins, no matter how bad.

But they also knew that they would still have to do a penance for those sins. And, you know, you wipe out a village, penance is going to be pretty enormous. And so, and they knew that when they died and death, these are people where death is that close. It's everywhere around you. People die at all ages for no good reason. And so you're always, everyone, not just the nights, everyone is thinking about where will I be. And for them, they're wealthy. They kill people.

They know they're not going to do well on this. they're going to end up in purgatory a long time. And nowadays, you know, Catholics, when they talk about purgatory, you know, it's like a waiting room or something, you know, before you go into heaven. But in the Middle Ages, it was fire. And they did not want to be there. And so they sought ways to do penance. The crusade was a great opportunity for them in this regard, because what Pope Urban II offered to them was to be a good. was to be able to use the one thing that they knew how to do well, which was fight for the benefit of their soul because they would be doing it as an act of charity.

All right. Do you mind if we, I want to zoom maybe in. Okay. Tell me about the culture milieu out of which the first crusade sprung and exactly how it was called. Was it called a crusade? How and how did these people understand what it was that they were doing? Yeah, it's a great question. Because it's bizarre when you think about it.

The Crusades are just an amazing phenomenon. I don't know any places in history in which you have tens of thousands of warriors who are motivated to march. And you're referring to the First Crusade? Yeah. Okay. How many soldiers marched in that? Generally, the best estimates now are probably around 30,000. Some people say 40,000.

Okay. And there were many thousands that marched part of the way and didn't make it the whole way. What I'm interested in is how these men became so motivated to go on such a dangerous mission. It wasn't like they were watching the news and seeing their Christian brothers being oppressed. Right. How did that, how do they think about it? Well, as I said, all of them lived in a cultural milieu in which they were giving, they were doing things, penitential acts. So they might go on a pilgrimage someplace.

But they would also give funds and lands to monasteries for prayers for their souls after they died. So that was already had been built up. The culture of chivalry was developing, too, which comes out of the monasteries and is being preached to them. There's a very close relationship between noble families and monasteries in the Middle Ages. Okay. They both are, they'll give their children, some of their children to the monasteries who will be raised there. But they're also helping to fund the monasteries, and the monasteries in return are saying prayers for them and masses and the rest. So all of that was put forth through the 11th century reform movements.

And so all the foundations were there. Then the Turks come, and they wipe out after 1071, after the Battle of Manzakert. They defeat the Christian Byzantine forces in the east. And then they turn towards Jerusalem and they capture Jerusalem from the Arabs, making it very difficult for Christians to be able to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem anymore. And in fact, the churches are all pretty much in ruins in Jerusalem already by this point. So Jerusalem's in pretty bad circumstances even before the Turks arrive, but when the Turks arrive, it becomes very bad. the emperor in Constantinople is out of, I mean, by this point, the Christian world has become not much more than Western Europe. It's getting smaller and smaller. And the emperor in

Constantinople, Alexeius, Cominus, he doesn't have any other options. Who else to ask? The only Christian powers that exist are in Western Europe. So he swallows his pride, and he asks the Pope for help. And Urban II, the Pope, takes that plea, ultimately, and brings it in 1095 at the Council of Claremont to the knights who were there, mostly southern French knights who were there. And he, Urban, acts as that news providing the news of the day. He tells the stories of what has been going on in the East, how these Christians, your brothers and sisters in Christ are being killed,

their lands are being taken from them. All of it is being done purely because they're Christians. And now they call to you and ask you. In fact, frequently, preachers would talk about how Christ is crucified again in the pains and the deaths of his children. So it's like, and they would imagine this and they would think about Christ being crucified because his people are suffering in the East. And so as Urban told them, if you will, at your own expense and your own peril, if you will

take the vow and go on crusade to write this wrong, then that will constitute a plenary indulgence, a full indulgence, all the penalties, temporal penalties due to sin. That was an amazing, from a medieval perspective, that was an amazingly good deal. And so an enormous number of, now, but still most knights did not go on crusade, but many thousands did. And then this message was then taken and given to preachers, like Peter the Hermit was probably the most famous of these preachers, but there was lots of others. And they went all across Europe and they would preach to people and they would tell them what's going on.

And for most Europeans, they had no idea that this was what was happening, that their world was getting smaller and smaller. Right. And something needed to be done. And they needed to come to the aid of these people. And so it was the First Crusade when it was called, the idea was let's push back the Turkish advance in Asia Minor, give the Byzantines back their territory. What does that mean practically? So these crusaders are going to Jerusalem?

What are they taking? Who are they attacking? How are they giving it back to the business? Yeah. I mean, when the first crusade began, the plan was that they would march to Constantinople. If you look at a map, if you're going to march east, the place where Europe becomes Asia is Constantinople. All roads pretty much lead there. And in fact, they would use the old Roman roads sometimes.

So you would march to Constantinople. You're coming to help the emperor. And he has enormous amounts of money. So he can help you out. And then the idea was they would all meet there and then march towards the Turks, who were right there on the other side of the Straits. Their capital of the Sultanate of Room,

what it was called, the Seljuk Turks, the Sultanate, was in Nicaea. which was the city made holy by the First Council of Nicaea and the Nicaean Creed. And so that was their first goal was to attack Nicaea and to restore it back to the control of Constantinople. So that's what they did. Now, in the Middle Ages, to have an army that big, this is the biggest army since the ancient Romans, they don't really have the infrastructure for those kinds of armies. I mean, there's no supply lines.

You don't have trucks or something that are going to bring food. No supply food. Right. And so what they would do is, particularly as they marched across Greece, is the emperor spent the year before this

bringing food stuffs together. And then they would set up markets so that they could purchase. Nothing was free, but they could purchase the food from the local markets. Once they crossed the straits and went into Asia

and began being in terms, Turkish territory, the idea would be that you would, as you conquer territory, you would then forage and take food from the crops in the fields and livestock and other things of that sort. And you would live on that. But there's no supply lines. There's no, again, there's no colonialism here because there's no home government. There is no, many years ago, I went to a conference in Australia, in Sydney, on the logistics of the Crusades. And all of these medieval historians were there,

specialists in medieval logistics. And they talked about, you know, how much food the horses would eat and how much fodder they would need and how much food, everything else, what wine, you know, how much wine they would have and all the rest and how they would move this stuff. And frequently they would say things like,

well, they would know that they wouldn't want to go here because they wouldn't be able to bring together enough food for that. And at one point I just said, you know, the one thing that every one thing that everyone here is leaving out of their calculations, that would have been foremost for these crusaders, is God. They're literally doing God's work. They expect that God will provide for them. And when you look at the First Crusade, that's pretty much the way. It was by the seat of your pants the whole way. And I always say the First Crusade was constantly teetering on the edge of utter disaster.

Yeah. And yet it was miraculously. successful. It went from one success to another. They captured Nicaea, gave it back to the Byzantines. Wow. After a siege of almost a year, they took Antioch, one of the ancient Christian seas, and they took that for themselves. By that time, they had fallen out of love with the emperor because he had basically hung them out to dry at Antioch. How many Mohammedans died in the in the First Crusade. So you see about 30,000 marched. Right.

Yeah. It's hard to say there were major pitch battles. On both sides, a lot of people died during the Crusades by medieval standards. By modern standards, it's nothing. But by medieval standards, it's a fair number of people because the Crusades have more pitched battles. In the Middle Ages, most warfare is siege warfare. Okay. Which means you just sit around and wait.

But when you have... pitch battles on open fields, a lot of people are going to get killed in those. And so, like in the First Crusade, the Battle of Doraleim, which was the Turks against the Crusaders, you have a fair number of people who die on both sides. In Antioch, actually, nobody really died because they were able to, well, a lot of people died of starvation among the Crusaders because they had no food. But they were able to take Antioch because they were able to bribe a Christian Captain of the Guard who opened the gates and they got in.

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I mean, anyone would be. Why would you have thousands and thousands of these guys coming? That far. Yeah. Yeah. For, I mean, it made no sense. And so they, no. When did they first get wind that this army was coming?

Well, it kind of was odd because before the main body the crusade arrived in 1096, there was this pre-crucissade, which historians refer to as the People's Crusade. It was mainly a lot of poor knights and some peasants who were all following Peter the Hermit, thousands of them. They had no money. They had no real way of causing much damage to an army. they crossed over and when the Turks found out, when the Sultan

Kielidjarslan found out, he destroyed them, pretty much wiped them out easily. Peter the Herman was as far as we know the only one to survive. How many of them were there

do you think? Probably about 10,000. Wow. Yeah. And they were all massacred except for those who were willing to convert to Islam.

But the rest were all massacred. So when the The Crusaders arrived the next year. It was natural for the Turkish Sultan to think more of the same. Yeah, 10,000 hermits. Yeah, he quickly found out that was not the case. So they defeated him.

Also, the Turks had no real experience with the warfare systems in Western Europe. Tell me about that. Yeah, primarily the big one that they didn't know about was the Frankish Charge, which is the large warhorse and the armored knife. night on and essentially what you did, they would spend much of their life training for these things. It was very difficult. But the knight would, they would get on their horses, they would line up in a row. They had these long lances. They had the saddles that would fuse them to the horse with the stirrups. And then they would point the lance at something they didn't like.

And then they'd all charge at once. Wow. Anna Khamina. What a terrifying. Oh, yeah. So you're coming at you. Yeah, the Byzantine emperor's daughter, Anna Konyna, who was there when they came, she wrote a kind of history of it. She said that, you know, that it was so terrifying. She said that the walls of Babylon could not withstand the Frankish church. In fact, of course, it was useless against walls, but against infantry, it was devastating.

So, and the Turks had no response to that. Now, eventually they did get a response. you know, light mounted archers became the main response to that. But at least in that first crusade, they didn't really know. They had no experience with this. So they went, as I say, they went from success to success, capturing Antioch. Who's appointing the captains of these particular? That's the thing is there is nobody doing that.

There's no central command. not in a place to be able to pick out who should be in charge. And this is true throughout the Crusades. Unless there is a king, and there's no kings on the first crusade. So unless there's a king, all of these, the only thing that holds us together is that they all have a common vow to God. That's it. Now, particularly for barons who are very powerful, so, you know, if you're talking about like a God-Frey-de-Bion on the, on the First Crusade, or a Raymond of Toulouse,

who was a very powerful baron in southern France, he's not going to be told what to do by anyone. And so that means that all decisions of the host have to be made in a council of barons. So everything is up for debate. And this is why crusades frequently go off in strange directions. I mean, they're really very much a product of a committee,

You know, they pray for guidance, but still there's going to be various groups. And in the First Crusade, there definitely were. There was, you know, Raymond of Toulouse was very much opposed to Bowiement of Toronto. And so the two of them were tug of warring it outside the walls of Antioch. So it's a miracle that these things move forward at all. During the First Crusade, what was the relationship between the church in the west and the church in the east? Yeah, it was tense. oftentimes people will say that it was schism by that time.

Most medieval historians would dispute that nowadays. I mean, usual, if you're on Jeopardy and they ask you, when did the schism happen? Definitely say 1054 with the mutual excommunications that happened at that time. But in reality, no one really noticed 1054. In the West, it's not even mentioned in the Monastic Chronicles. Also, canonically, the excommunication of the patriarchal Constantinople was not valid because the papal legate in Constantinople was, he no longer had authority because the Pope, Leo the 9th, had died. And they hadn't elected a new pope yet. So there was no authority to excommunicate anyone.

And there's still a fair amount of work that's going on between the popes and the Byzantine government. well after that. And in fact, when the Turks first conquered at Manzaker, the Byzantines, Alexius had asked for help then in the 1070s. And the Pope at the time, Gregory the 7th, he wanted to go and lead the army himself and go and help them. So you can see there's, it's clearly not a schism. They still see each other as together.

Now, I know things get hairy in the Fourth Crusade, but it's, this point is this helping reconcile that was the hope that was the hope um urban the second hoped that that by coming to the aid of their of the east that this would bind them together more and and help them to get over these these difficulties let me ask you a complete out of field question if urban the second had never called the first crusade and no crusades were ever uh engaged in what what do you think would have happened to the Christians in the East? What would have happened to that land? If there had never been a crusade, it's very counterfactual. We're historians are trained not to do this, but I'll do it. I'll do it. Honestly, I think if there had never been a crusade,

all of Western Europe would have been conquered by Islamic powers. The superpower of the Middle Ages was Islam. The West was weak and fractious and at war with itself. There was While the Islamic powers were rich, massive, they had controlled an enormous amount of territory, and they had an ideology of expansionism, of the jihad. And they made no bones about the fact that they wanted to conquer everything. So I think had you not had crusades, which at least slowed the advance of Islam, it never stopped. They never stopped them. If you look at, you know, the Islamic world in the 16th century, when Suleiman Magnificent

is reigning from Constantinople, they've grown to even greater power by that time. They control all of southeastern Europe. They've conquered Hungary. He's making a bid for Vienna. So without those crusades that at least slowed the advance, I've always thought that likely by the 16th century or maybe even earlier, you would have just had a conquest of all of Western Europe. And, you know, Christianity would have survived,

just as it does in Muslim countries today, but it would be a minority, small minority religion. Rome would have a pope, I suppose, but he would be much like the patriarch of Constantinople now is in Istanbul. You know, very little power. he has to be approved by the by the Turkish government so still the case yeah it's still true yeah the Turkish government the Sultan's used to approve him but but nowadays the Turkish is it more of a formality today or I think so although they're not going to bring somebody in who's a real

firebrand I don't think but but yeah the so it would have been something more akin to that I mean and to be honest there were many cases in in church history where where that came very close to happening. I mean, Vienna, also 1480, Memit II, the Sultan,

landed at O'Tranto in Italy. It was his beach had to invade Italy. There was not going to be a defense of

Italy. In Rome, everyone was packing their bags to head north of the Alps. There wasn't even going to be

a defense. But as it happened, I mean, they captured of Toronto. They massacred the population

that wouldn't convert to Islam. God bless that. Yeah. Actually, the church there has the martyrs of a Toronto. Wow. Very fresh. You see this whole, they have a whole thing of skulls because they were all beheaded on the wall of those who were gone beheaded.

God. Glory to Jesus Christ. Yeah. What a beautiful gift. Yeah. Wow. But it's amazing. But that, and the only thing that saved them was Memmett II died right then.

And that was the end of it. What signaled the end of the first crusade? And did everyone know, okay, the crusade has ended? Or how did that? Kind of, yeah. I mean, the big thing, what they really wanted was to capture Jerusalem. Yeah. And so they arrived there in 1099, in the summer of 1099,

and in July, they capture Jerusalem. That was what they came to do. And so that was, and the vow of the cross was, I should say, and you asked this before, but Crusade was not the term used at that time. They referred to it as a pilgrimage. And in the documents that, you know, that we have, they refer to themselves as pilgrims who are going off to pray at the Holy Church of the Holy Sepulner, which was in ruins. And to kill anybody who should try to prevent that? That's right.

That's right. It's very different to the pilgrimage I went on in 2000. I'm expecting trouble, so I brought many of my well-armed friends with me. 30,000, just in case we should be denied entry. Yeah. Wow. So once they had prayed at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, their vow was complete. Yeah.

And they all went home. Come on. The vast majority of them were very, and they went home as heroes. So how did the Byzantine emperor view the Pope? and the Christians of the West at that point? I mean, he was, Alexius had never, when he saw 30,000 men showing up,

that's not what he asked for. He just wanted an expeditionary force to push back some Turks. Oh, okay. He figured maybe he'd get, because by this point, the Byzantines mostly lived off of mercenaries. They didn't like to fight

and they were terrible at it. Okay. But they had plenty of money. So they could purchase mercenaries, and that's what he wanted. But these guys didn't want money. And so he definitely had to

manage this. So he had all the main leaders swear a vow that anything that they captured would be given back to him. Most of them took the vow, not all, but, and then he didn't even go with them. He just kind of let them loose. Yeah.

And then off they went. Now, by the time they captured Antioch, they were anger with him because he was supposed to come help them, and he ended up not coming and left. And so that's why they decided to keep Antioch for themselves. And they pretty much said anything else that we capture were not giving back to him. What about the Christian priests and monks and nuns? And what was their general attitude towards these crusaders? Do we know? There was no one who disagreed that this was a righteous thing to do. I see. There's a

except the Muslims. Yeah. Well, and the Muslims had no understanding of what they were doing there. Most Muslims, when the Crusaders... Just confused. Yeah, when they showed up, they thought these guys must be Byzantine mercenaries or something. Yeah. They're as confused as the English art of the invasion they're currently experiencing. How did that happen? Yeah. No, they honestly, they had no concept of why these people were there. And to be honest, if you read the actual Islamic tracks in which they talk about these crusaders, they called them Frange, because they heard Frank.

But they don't even give them agency. From their point of view, they are just simply God punishing us. Oh. Because we've been sinful and we have been disunified, and so God sent us these locusts into our world. And as soon as we stop being sinful, he will get rid of them. Yeah. That's kind of true.

We agree with that, don't we? So, yeah, they didn't really have much of an understanding of why they were there. Traditionally, in the Islamic world, they had very little interest in things outside of the Ulma, of the Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam. They didn't really care that much about it.

So, from most people think that this crusade was a success. Yeah. What is Pope Ovan the Second saying at this point? He was thrilled about it, obviously. I mean, he died just about that time as they were getting to Jerusalem. Okay. But, yeah, everyone was, it's hard to imagine.

Europeans, once they got news of the victory at Jerusalem, it changed everything. I mean, there had already been a big reform movement throughout Europe and lay piety and other types of movements. But once that, that was the clearest indication from the medieval mindset that God was pleased with his people, that he had given to them and allowed them to. It allowed them to redeem the land of his son and that the holy sites would now be protected and that pilgrims could go and pray freely. Did the Mohammedans destroy the holy sites or did they reverence them?

How did they treat them? Yeah, the church of the Holy Sepulchre had been destroyed in 1009. Intentionally? Yeah. Because it was the Holy Sepulchre. Yeah, the Sultan in Egypt, the Fatimid Sultan, Al-Hakim, he ordered its destruction.

Now, sometimes you hear people say, well, he was crazy. And that may be, but it was destroyed. The Turks refused to allow it to be repaired. So when the crusaders arrived, it was all in ruins. Most churches were in ruins. There were some, well, all the Christians had been kicked out of Jerusalem long before. Once the crusade was on the march, they kicked them out.

There had been some Christian institutions there prior to that, but many of them prior to that. But once the crusade began to approach, they expelled all the Christians. But as I was saying, for Europeans, it meant that God was pleased with them. And were these Christians back at home being encouraged by their priests and to fast and to pray for the success? Absolutely. Absolutely. So they feel intimately spiritually part of this. And as the Crusades went on over the centuries, because no one thought the first crusade was the first anything. Right.

They thought this was a one-off. Yeah. And then as it happened, it became a massive multi-examination. century project that Europeans would pour massive amounts of blood and treasure into. But as that time went on, they were called to be part of the effort. Everyone could take part in the effort. And prayers, fastings, processions, all of that was, in fact, in many ways, it was more important than the warriors, because the warriors could only be successful.

if God made them successful. A colleague of mine at Dartmouth, Cecilia Kaposchkin, she has a wonderful book called Invisible Weapons. And the whole thing is a, it's fairly dense medieval history. But what she did is she examined the liturgies during the period of the Crusades and looked at how the church addressed God in the liturgy, asking for, in this project of safeguarding the holy sites.

And that tells us a lot because this is their dialogue with God. It shows how important. And for them, this was the most important thing, was the prayers, the fasting, alms giving, all the rest of that so that they would have success ultimately in the Crusades. So then what took place to bring about the Second Crusade? Yeah. So the first crusade in the years after 1099, mostly they're doing a lot of consolidation crusades.

There's always, I should say, people think that there's only like a certain number of crusades because there are some that have numbers. But there's countless crusades. Okay. There's always kind of a steady stream of various groups of crusaders after the first. If by crusade we mean, what, a pilgrimage? Pilgrimage and, yeah, and those who are taking the vow of a cross to go and help. and secure the Holy Land. What became the kingdom of Jerusalem there, which is the crusader state.

So there's always waves of this taking place. Exactly. Can you tell us about the vow of the cross? Yeah. You would, it was very akin to the pilgrimage vow. So in the Middle Ages, if you went, you were going to go on a pilgrimage, you would take a vow to take of the pilgrimage, and you would then prepare, and you would wear something distinctive.

You know, you'd have your staff and your script, oftentimes like St. James, the seashell on the hat, or something like that. And that way people would know you were a pilgrim, and they could help you out on your pilgrimage. The crusade was the same type of thing, except it was an armed pilgrimage, and so you would make the same kind of vow, but your sword would be blessed.

You would make that same commitment and to signify your vow, in this case, you would wear a cross. Now, eventually they would have big crosses that they would wear, but in the early years of the Crusades, they would just put like a cross on the shoulder because you're carrying the cross of Christ. You're taking up your cross and following him.

And so that way everyone would know, oh, okay, you've taken the vow of the cross, and people, you know, could help you as you prepared for that journey. So now, once you took the vow, you could not get out of it. It was pretty binding. The only way out was essentially, you know, the Pope would have to let you out of it. But now, Erwin was very clear in the First Crusade that he did not want anyone taking the

vow of the cross who was not a warrior. Yeah. Because they would just slow up everything. And he also didn't want any Spaniards. Okay. Because they're fighting the Muslims in Spain. Okay. And he says, that's your fight there to restore the church in Spain.

So you're not going to the Holy Land. So in addition to restoring Jerusalem to the Byzantines, what else is involved in this commitment, this promise? Yeah. Honestly, the vow is only to pray at the Church of the Holy Spirit. Oh, that's it. That's it. Yep. So that's why when in the First Crusade, when the Barons,

get there and the emperor says, I want a vow saying that you'll give me back any territory you conquer. A lot of them said, well, that's not what I signed up for. And in fact, Raymond of Toulouse said, you know, I took a vow to God and God alone. I will not take a vow to you. So, yeah, so the only thing that really was

that bound them together was that vow. And that's why frequently in later crusades, And even in this crusade, periodically some groups would just decide, I'm going to go someplace else. I'm going to go in this direction. You guys want to go that way? That's fine. So in the first crusade, you have Baldwin who goes off to Odessa.

Now he's looking for food and things like that, but he ends up taking over the city of Edessa. And it becomes the first to the crusader states, even before Jerusalem. But to get to your question about during those years, the next 40 years or so, the kingdom of Jerusalem grows, and there's a lot of these smaller crusades that help it to grow. And then in 1147, they have their first setback, and that is the Odessa Falls and is captured and the population is massacred.

And when word arrives in Europe, Pope Eugenius calls it a new crusade, and that's the second crusade. Now, by this time, you know, four decades has gone by, the stories of the First Crusaders are monumental. I mean, they're sung in every court. This is their greatest generation. Yes. And so, wow, I get a chance to do that. I mean, everybody wants to get on board on this. You know, before it was just some kind of, you know, new idea.

Now everyone wants on. So the King of France joins up, the German Emperor, joins up. So it's, it's, and in fact, the King of France, Louis the 7th, he brings along Eleanor of Aquitaine, his queen, who also takes the cross and joins as well. So it's a, Is she the first woman to do that? I mean, people argue over that. There had been wives that had taken the cross and gone along with them, but to do it, you really had to have a lot of wealth. Yeah. And the Queen of France had a fair amount of wealth. So, but yes, she took the cross in her own regard.

There were women on the Crusades, but they tended to be, you know, like washerwomen or also camp followers, prostitutes that would come. So this second vow, what are they promising in this vow? In the second crusade? Yeah. Yeah, because Jerusalem's already controlled by that time. In this one, they're promising to ultimately to go to the church's holy sepulchre. But they're also doing this so that they can restore these Christian. lands that have been conquered.

And by this point, it was perfectly fine to have the vow where you wouldn't actually have to go to the church to Holy Sepulchre. Because, as I say, in Spain, people are crusaders now, and they're fighting to restore Christian lands, but they're not going to the Holy Sepulchre. In fact, in Europe, they begin building lots of, like, replicas of the Holy Sepulchre. A lot of the Templar churches are round churches that are replicas. of the Holy Sepulchus so that you could, so that you could kind of visit it without visiting it in that way. Who were the Knights Templar?

Yes, well, they weren't, those are another thing that are massively misunderstood. If you've ever read, you know, Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, everything is wrong in that. Yeah, it's... How frustrating is that, as a historian, to read that, knowing that people around you take that as fact. Oh, I know. It's bizarre. No, the Knights Templar were essentially, this was a, what's called a military order, and they began in the immediate years after the First Crusade. It was essentially a group of knights, Hugh of Payne was one of them, who they had gone to Jerusalem.

By this time, Jerusalem's in Christian hands. There's a king of Jerusalem, and they wanted to devote their lives to, protecting pilgrims there. And so they went to the king and said, that's what we want to do. We want to form a kind of a confraternity where we will take a vow to devote our lives to protection of Christian pilgrims. And so he said, okay, great. And we'll set you up. You can have, basically what he gave them was the El Aksa Mosque on Temple Mount and said that can be your headquarters. And so that they took that. Now, the Alaksa Mosque was a fairly new mosque, only about 30 or 40 years old.

But the Crusaders didn't know what it was. They thought it was the Temple of Solomon. Okay. So the knights started calling themselves the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. Okay. And so that meant that in later centuries, you get all these crazy conspiracy theories that they found, like, Solomon's gold, or secrets of Solomon or something like that. But in fact, that was not the Temple of Solomon at all. But they were, they devoted themselves, and ultimately, they got the attention of St. Bernard of Clairbeau,

who thought this was really a wonderful thing. And he wrote a tract called On the New Knighthood in which he commended knights to do this, to give their whole life over and to live in common. in Lycom monastic community, but one where it wasn't devoted to just prayer within a cloister, but rather was devoted to action, doing actions to protect the holy sites and to protect Christian pilgrims. And so these would be trained warriors who would live in common and would serve in the military capacity. They were very important because the crusader states, over time, they got kind of a native baronage that lived there and were born there. But it was always kind of, Christians were always the minority.

The majority of the people who lived in the crusader states were Muslims. And they were surrounded by very powerful Muslim states. So they needed a constant influx of crusaders or something just to keep things going. The military orders, the Templars, and then also the hospitlers, that allowed for a permanent presence of men who could fortify areas, who could provide defenses for the crusades. And because they would have houses all over Europe, they could raise funds and they could also recruit into their order, into the Templars. As America turns 250 this year, we're going to hear a lot about the history and culture, but we'll probably forget the people who actually fed this country, namely America's ranches. For generations, they've been getting up before the sun in every kind of weather to put real food on our tables.

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If you were, you had to be a trained knight. So you couldn't just pick this up. You couldn't just be a streamer. No. On YouTube, with a little people love the night kind of. Yeah, and training to be a knight started when you were a boy. Uh-huh. So if you hadn't started early. And they took a vow of celibacy? Yeah, yeah, they took a vow of celibacy.

So families are giving their children over, their boys over, presumably, to train. Sometimes, yeah. Now, usually with Templars, they would be adults before they entered. So they didn't really have obelates the way you would have in a monastery. usually you would be an adult by the time you joined. The hospitalers were the other major military order, and they were a hospital order originally, and then they just kind of created a separate arm

to protect, again, to protect the Christians. And so they remained those two arms. One was what they called the brothers in arms, and then the brothers of the hospital. So there was one more offensive, one more defensive? One was literally hospitals. It was the carer of, of the sick and the poor.

They called it the holy poor. They saw Christ in the poor. And there was no charge. Their hospitals in Jerusalem were massive. So people are bringing wounded Christians to them, then going in. Or just frequently people would go on pilgrimage, even if they weren't warriors, they would go on a pilgrimage there. And then they get sick and die. And so they would bring them there.

If they died, they would get a Christian burial. Everything was paid for by them. but they also had the arm of the military arm too, and they built castles. And so the hospitlers and the Templars were the two big military orders right from the beginning. There were others that came later, but those were the two major ones.

Now, the Templars, they were, they got rid of those in the 14th century. Why? Mainly because they had a lot of money by that time. The King of France, Philip IV was in desperate need of money. He had already kicked out all the Italian bankers and took all their money.

Then he expelled all the Jews and took all their money. He was running out of people to expel. And the last person, the group, was the Templars. And so he accused them of basically being devil worshippers and sodomy, you know, having demons as pets. I mean, he accused them of everything. He ordered a mass arrest of all of them. In France, they were tortured until they confessed to whatever they told them to confess. Yeah.

To whatever they said. And eventually, so many of them confessed. Now, amazingly, the Templars were an international order. Lots of other kingdoms looked into it and they said, huh, it's funny. We don't have this problem here. Why is it only in France? The Templars are fine here. But he basically confiscated all their property, and then the only way that they could basically escape was say that what they did was true, that they had done these things, and then leave the order, and then they could go do what they wanted to do, but in most cases.

And so everyone, including the general of the order, all confessed, and because there was not much other choice, it was completely contrary to, again, this was a church order. That means it does not fall under royal courts. It falls under the canon law courts. The Inquisition should have been the one to look at this. But the king knew that wouldn't work. So Philip did his own courts. And He'd used it as a way. But because of how sensational it was, people have read into it that this was like secret rituals or things of that sort, things that they were accused of. But clearly, we're not the case. The Pope Clement after that, the new Pope Clement, the 5th, he was French and he was a friend of the popes of the kings. And so to diffuse the whole thing, he just suppressed the whole order after that. And so that's what happened to the Templars.

But, and you know, nobody even remembered the poor Templars after that. Really until the late 17th century when you get Freemasonry. It's basically Freemasonry that resurrects them and says that they are actually, that they are actually the real Templars. And that the Templars were actually opposed to both kings and popes. Oh, come on. Yeah. And it's all hogwash.

Oh, it's all hogwash. Amazing. It's all made up. Yeah, to this day, I mean, you know, Freemasons will say they'll always have pictures of Jacques de Molay being burned at the stake. He's one of us. Yes, that's right. He's one of us.

So, you know, it's... And the host, what do you call the hospitalers? Hospitlers. They survived. They still exist, the Knights of Malta. Yeah. Oh, okay. Let me ask, let's just dial this back a bit. I can imagine someone saying, how on earth can you reconcile with a straight face having a military order and turn the other cheek if someone slaps you? And he who fights with the sword dies by the sword. Blessed are the meek. How is this not an obvious perversion of Christianity that you're reinterpreting or something to make it seem like it's just. assistant with it.

Yeah. Well, first of all, Christianity has never been a pacifist religion. I mean, violence is in the Middle Ages and throughout Christian belief was always, I mean, Christ also said, I have not come to bring peace but a sword. So it depends on what the violence is being used for. St. Augustine had long ago addressed these questions, is, is it illicit for a Christian to be a military man? Yes, it is. Is it illicit to wage war?

Yes, if it's a just war. If you are protecting those who would otherwise be harmed. And that's what's going on in the military orders. The military order's purpose, again, it's not offensive. They're not going off to conquer new territory. They're going to defend Christians in those territories. And in that regard, they're protecting. the body of Christ, as they saw it, that the whole body of Christ, there are places where it is

being attacked by the enemies of Christ, and that they are going and giving their lives for that purpose. So it was not seen in any ways being a contradiction at all. In fact, quite the contrary. I mean, frequently they would say, you know, if you look at the parable of the Good Samaritan, You know, this neighbor, this neighbor, your, you know, the person who is there has been beaten up by thieves. And he's laying there by the side of the road. So should you just turn away and ignore him?

Or should you stop and try to bind up his wounds and help him and be that good neighbor? The difference in this case is that the robbers are still there. And they're still doing it. So you can avert your eyes and ignore it. It's like walking down a road while the man's being kicked continually. Yeah. So you can stop this and help this person or you can look the other way. And clearly the Christian would act to stop it.

Why is it, do you think then that a lot of non-Christians or modern non-practicing Christians view Christianity as if it were a pacifist religion? How did that come about? I don't know. I mean, in the earliest church, there was questions about it. There was a lot of people didn't know what the answers to those things were. But this was pretty much settled by the fourth century. So it's long been known that Christians, that Christianity is not a pacifist religion. Now, the thing with, there's a difference between a just war and a holy war. Okay.

Just war is perfectly acceptable within Christianity. The Holy War was, that was something that was new with the Crusades, sanctifying war as a penitential and devotional act, which is what it was. That was something that was new and that developed here in the 11th century. So you can have a just war, which is not a holy war, but you cannot have a holy war, which is also not a just. Yeah, it would have to be a just war. Yes, I see. And in fact, the canon, the decreedists would sometimes talk about how, you know, could you have a crusade, for example, in an area that had never been Christian? So, for example, if someone said, let's launch a crusade against Mecca, and they said, no, because it's never been Christian.

This is not Christian territory that had been conquered and that you're trying to write that wrong. All of those territories, now over time they would also say, well, you could also have a crusade, for example, if missionaries are being killed. So you're sending a missionary somewhere and they're all being massacred.

Then you could send soldiers in to try to protect them from being massacred, things of that sort. But those were very specific situations. The main crusades, which were the Eastern Crusades, those were really for the protect, to restore lands that were Christian and to bring them back, to restore them. The restoration of the church, as the popes would frequently say. Well, there's different places in the world today where Christians are being oppressed and murdered by Mohammedans. Can you therefore imagine a realistic scenario where the Pope calls for a crusade and what would that even look like with modern states? Yeah, I think that's the reason why is because the reason that the Pope was asked for this in the first place by the Byzantine Emperor and why they responded is because there was no alternative.

In Western, there were no nation states. That's right. Yeah. Kingdoms are not nation states. The average. The average person in the Middle Ages had no idea what kingdom they lived in and didn't care. There was no affinity with that. Your affinity was with whatever your region was. The only thing that bound everyone together was their Catholic faith. They were all part of the church. Yes.

And so the only leader of Europe was the Pope. And so when the Byzantine emperor wanted to ask Europe for help, he didn't go to the German emperor who calls himself the Holy Roman Emperor. He goes to the Pope because he wants a response. And when people hear about what is being done to Christians in the East in the Middle Ages, they viscerally respond because it's like it's happening to their own family. It's the same way we respond when we hear about Americans being killed somewhere. They didn't have nationalism back then.

It was the same feeling that you are part of something bigger than yourself, and it's being attacked. And people just like you are being killed, and someone needs to do something about it. And so that's why they, it was a very emotional experience to take the cross. These nights frequently would fall down on their knees, weeping tears, crying, saying that they wanted, you know, as Conrad, the second did when he took the cross and the second cruise. He just fell to his knees after being, he was being preached by Bernard de Clairvaux. He was a great preacher. And he just said, I am ready to serve him and went off on crusades. So it was a very emotional experience.

Now, sometimes people the next morning, you know, would say, what did I do? Do we have any records of Bernard of Cleovo's homilies? Yeah. Oh, yeah. How did he try to convince Christians to join the Crusades? For him, he was the big proponent of the Second Crusade. And what he argued was, he said, look, this is, God has given us this great gift of rich indulgence because he needs our aid in the East. Or he says he feigns to need our aid.

He feigns weakness. And he does it to give us the opportunity to serve him. and to have this rich indulgence, to have this plenary indulgence, to serve him. And given the fact that he is on our side, we cannot fail. So those who take the cross, who march off to restore Edessa and to write this wrong, God will reward you enormously. So, yeah, he saw it as a great blessing that this was given. Now, the Second Crusade failed utterly.

In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that it would have been better if it had never launched. Can you sum up why it failed? Yeah, I mean, it ultimately about half of the, or a little more than half of the soldiers died in Asia Minor in various battles. And so only a fraction of the force made. it to Antioch. By that time, they were too few of them to actually go for Odessa. And so they went to Jerusalem. And then in the Council of Barons, they decided to attack Damascus, which was actually an ally. It was Muslim, but it was allied with the crusaders. And then the actual attack of Damascus was an abject failure. It lasted less than a day when they had to retreat.

So the whole thing was an absolute mess. And Bernard was scandalized by it. But this led then to the beginnings of Europeans saying, well, how could that happen? God is obviously not on the side of the Muslims who won. So how is it that we failed? And what Bernard said and what other homilands, would say after that is that the same thing that you see in the Old Testament.

It's not that God likes the Babylonians or that he, it's that he uses them as a scourge. Isn't it interesting then that the Christians come up with the same explanation that the Mohammedids did in the first question? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, we are failing because of our sinfulness. How did the Pope respond? Yeah, that's pretty much how they responded to.

And then, of course, things would go from bad to worse. In the Holy Land, you would have the rise of Nourdin and then Saladin. And then in 1187, you have the defeat at the Battle of Hatine. And shortly after that, Saladin conquers Jerusalem. And this, I mean, literally the Pope died when he heard the news. He had a heart attack. Wow. I mean, it was just, it was just, in fact, the papal bull that came out after this is called Audita Tremenda.

I mean, this news, this tremendous news that has come bad, tremendous in a bad way. Europeans were just shocked because it was so clear that God was angry with them. And this is where you start to get, it really affected all of Christian society in Europe because people, start thinking, what can we do? I always say the Crusades and the success of the Crusades became for Europeans the barometer of the soul of Europe. When the Crusades were successful, they knew they were right with God. When they failed, they knew that God was angry with them. And the problem is they almost always failed after the First Crusade. So the loss of Jerusalem was just devastating. And all throughout those years, if you look at

a lot of like the La Pidey movements that develop during this period. The mendicant orders. I was just about to say that. I was going to say I would imagine that you would necessarily, because of human nature, have heretical groups that begin to spring from the bosom of Holy Mother Church. And this is why, as you say, the mendicant orders had to come and respond to those errors, but with the same vigor that the Cathars. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah, the mendicant orders, you know, this holy poverty. of the Franciscans. The Dominicans are really focused against the heresy. But the Franciscans, they're just ministering on the streets to the poor,

and they're trying to give up everything and live in apostolic poverty. But am I right in thinking, though, that the failure of the Second Crusade and maybe more, was that led to some of these heretical groups that the mendicants were then a response to? Yeah, that's true.

And also just because when you start putting a bunch of people who are not trained in theology on the streets and let them preach. Some of what they preach is going to be wrong. It's sort of like when YouTube starts and you just let anyone preach. Like any knucklehead like me have a YouTube channel.

Who knows what kind of monkey business is going to take place? And in fact, that's what happens. I mean, you have most famously Peter Waldo, who is the poor men of Leone, he starts a whole thing that's like a mendic an order. They give up everything.

They preach on the street corners and they become this thing called the Waldensians and they go into heresy. Yes. So the church learned that this can be a good thing but it can be a bad thing too if it leads into heresy.

That's why they were, you know, Pope Innocent III was, you know, when Francis came to him and asked for the order to be created, he was like, yeah, couldn't you just join something else or join a monastery? But ultimately he did see that there was great value in this to be able to heart.

harness this energy and then to use it to preach orthodoxy. And so, yeah, but all of that, in many ways, that comes out of the Crusades. I want to get to the Fourth Crusade. Maybe we want to touch on something else named with the Third Crusade before that. But I do think it's important that we as Christians who are living in a turbulent time, not just in civilization, Western civilization, whatever that is, or has become, but also within the church. A lot of people feel, they look around and they don't see a strong church. They see it as weakened with heresy and scandal and I don't know. It's not that that's not important and shouldn't be fought against. Of course it should, but to realize, maybe to

take comfort in, in some way or another Christians have dealt with this since the beginning. I mean, isn't Augustine dying while Rome is burning? And then this, this, the scandal of, what's his name, the saint who preached in the Second Crusade, sorry? Bernard Clover. Yeah, yeah. Being scandalized by this failure, that these epic failures are taking place throughout church history, which Christians are continually having to confront. Yeah, absolutely.

And there's so many dark chapters in the history of the church. That's certainly the case. I know I have a friend, a priest friend who gets angry with me sometimes when he'll, because he'll go off on the things he's angry about what's going on in the hierarchy right now or whatever. And I'll say, oh, yeah, but this is nothing compared to the medieval. Oh, man. At least we only have one pope. Yeah.

Could you imagine? Could you imagine if we had three people claiming people to vote today? Yeah. I wanted to talk about the Fourth Crusade. Is there anything we should touch upon before we get to this? Fourth Crusade. No, I mean, the third crusade is kind of the Super Bowl of Crusades that most people know about. It's Richard the Lionheart versus Saladin and all of that stuff.

But ultimately, Richard is able, he's a brilliant tactician and he's able to reconquer most of what was taken, but he can't take Jerusalem. Okay. Because Jerusalem's not on the coast, and he takes the whole coast, but he can't take Jerusalem. And so the project is still, it's everyone from king to peasant in Europe thinks about Jerusalem. We know because there'll be like these spontaneous, protests of like peasants chanting, you know, Holy Sepulchre, Holy Sepulchre, Holy Sepulchre, Holy Sepulchre. And because, because they know that

every day it is being, it is under the control of the Muslims. And they know that that is a blaring indication of their own sinfulness. And that if they could just fix this. So, yeah, Richard actually, he was successful in a lot of ways, but he wasn't able to take Jerusalem. He planned to return, but then he ended up dying at 1199 and from a wound in battle, and so he wasn't able to ever go. So the Fourth Crusade was called by the great Pope of the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent the Third. It was his very first action when he became Pope in 1198.

Came in hot. Yeah. He's a young man, too. He's in his 30s, which was quite young for a Pope. And he just immediately called the crusade and sent out legates all across Europe. And this is the point at which the popes really have the administrative infrastructure to really do, and they have the menicans now to preach it. So they can get the word out all over Europe.

And so he is spreading this message of get everyone. The problem is so many people kind of expected Richard to do this, and so did innocent. But then when he dies, the whole thing kind of founders for a few years. And ultimately, it gets picked up again by largely a bunch of people who were related to Richard. barons in northern France, the Count of Champagne, Count of Blas, and a number of, they're very powerful men, but no kings. And they start getting an affair. It looks like it's going to be a pretty good crusade.

They're still recruiting, but it looks like it's going to be pretty big. And the idea is to restore Jerusalem. The problem is these guys all live in northern France, and they don't want to walk there. Because by this time the relations with Constantinople are terrible. And the Byzantines... Because the Byzantines have decided that they do not like crusaders marching through their territory anymore. Eating their food.

Yeah, eating their food. They almost always, oftentimes these crusaders will just decide the prices are too high, so they just take it. So the relationship has become very bad. Also, the emperor at that time, well, just before this, Isaac II, he actually had already made an alliance with Saladin. He even put a mosque in Constantinople, so they thought he was a traitor to the faith

that they didn't want anything to do with him. Also, Richard in the Third Crusade, he hadn't walked. He had gotten a fleet and sailed there. And they wanted to do it like Richard because he was like the big man. Yep. So, but the thing is, these guys don't have fleets. So what they do is they send

emissaries to Venice. Now, the Venetians were regular crusaders. They had crusaded quite a lot. And they had promised that they told the Pope basically that they would join the crusade if it got going. So they went there and they asked if the Venetians would join them and provide a fleet. So Venice said, okay, well, we'll have to build the fleet for an army that big. And then they said, Yeah, and we also need you to get all the provisions. Because the thing with fleets is you can't forage. You're going to have to bring the food with you on the ships. So you're going to have to get all that food ahead of time.

Long story short, they made a deal with the Venetians where Venice, they were given one year, and Venice would produce a massive fleet, like 400 and some major vessels, the largest fleet since ancient Rome. And they would produce that fleet. And they would produce the tons of provisions that they would have to buy because Venice doesn't grow anything. It's out on the water. Yeah. And they would bring all of that together. In exchange? In exchange for, and then they figured out how much per head.

They negotiated a price per head. Okay. So when the Crusaders arrive, each person pays their share. Okay. And we go. And they signed their agreement. The Pope ratified it. It was all, you know, Venetians are businessmen. So everything's going to be on contracts. And so everything is worked out.

And then the next year, the Crusaders start coming. to Venice. They bring them out to the Lido to wait for the rest of them to show up. The problem is, is that they told the Venetians that there would be 33,500 crusaders plus 10,000 horse. Okay. Only about 11,000 showed up. So they had a fleet that was three times too big.

Venice had borrowed all the money for this. And so they're, and they had a contract. And so they said, well, so they said, well, let's just wait for more people to show up. So that meant that they sat on the island eating their provisions month after month. How long were they waiting? They waited as long as they, I mean, they were starting to show up in June. They were there for July, August. The problem is it became a self-fulfilling prophecy because as more crusaders would arrive,

then they would start to get news. They said, do you hear what's going on in Venice? I mean, those guys are like a prisoners on that island. the Venetians won't let them leave and they owe a fortune and so these crusaders would say I'm not going that way or no they would just go other ports

because again nobody they're not bound by that treaty I see they can go anywhere so they go to Barri or something like else and they pay past it's still bound to go to Jerusalem yeah they go to Jerusalem yeah they go to Jerusalem so they'd show up in Jerusalem we'll meet them there

I'm not going for that so the worse it got the worse it got and so finally by the end of August or into September, now we're getting to the point where you're never going to make it to the Holy Land. Because you can't sail

in the winter in the Mediterranean. It's too rough. So the sailing season usually ends in late August. And there's nothing really to do. So eventually they work out a compromise. And the compromise is that Venice will essentially loan them

money that they can't afford if they promised to pay it to them out of if they get any booty which was pretty small likelihood because what other what other option do the venetians have yeah i mean the other option was yeah among the venetians there was a thing to just there were those who wanted to expel them and just keep the money that was been given which legally they would have been entitled to but the doge of venice the leader of that what are you going to do with all those ships yeah well yeah um so Ultimately, they came up with this compromise. And the compromise was to go to a town in Croatia. Today, it's called Zadar.

It was called Zara back then. This was a town that used to belong to Venice, but had rebelled. And so the Venetians said, look, if you help us retake this city, we can spend the winter there and leave in the spring. And if you do that for us, we'll loan you the money and you can pay us out of booty on the crusade. Because the Venetians were joining the crusade themselves.

too. There were many of Venetians on the crusaders. There were French. So it was very unpopular, but they finally agree because the alternative was go home. So they said, okay, so they went to Zara. The problem with Zara is it's a Catholic city. And they're crusaders. It's currently under the control of the King of Hungary who had also taken the cross. Now, he didn't ever want on crusade, but his lands are supposed to be protected by the church. Innocent had sent a letter forbidding them to attack under pain of excommunication. But, and in fact, that letter arrived just before they were about to attack the city. So.

And they did it? They had no choice. You know, starting something new can be terrifying. I remember when I launched Pints with Aquinas, I had no clue, really, what I was doing? I just kept thinking, what if no one listens? What if I make a fool of myself? and I'm pretty sure I've done that from time to time. Starting something new, like a podcast or business online, can sound a bit overwhelming.

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That's Shopify.com slash pints. They had no choice between the city. I mean, if they didn't attack, if they didn't attack, then the fleet went home. All right. And that was the end of the crusade. So, um, so they attack, no, not all of them. Some of them, like Simon de Montfort and some others, they removed themselves and didn't take part in it. But they, yeah, they attacked the city.

They captured it. Um, they spent the winter there. What does it mean for Catholics to attack and capture a Catholic city? I mean, it happens all the time. And in fact, there had been, I mean, everyone in Europe is Catholic. so they're all attacking each other. Fair, fair, okay. Now, and in fact, there had been other crusades that had attacked.

It was generally considered that it was fine to use a crusade to stabilize your domain. So, in other words, you know, you're attacking this person because you're a crusader, but you're doing it so that this will be stable while I'm gone. That was okay. I mean, Richard had attacked Messina in Sicily on the way out, which was Catholic. So it had been done. But the difference here was this city was under papal protection. And so that's, so the Cold Crusade was excommunicated.

Wow. And now they didn't tell the average crusaders because they knew they'd all go home. We'll let them know when they, they're done. They just thought, we'll work this out with the Pope. Yeah. They sent people to Rome. We'll work it out. Yeah, yeah.

But, yeah, so it just. And then they stayed the winter there. And then they only had enough food. by that point, because they only had a year's worth of food, they only had enough food not to get very far. They figured that if they left as soon as the spring, they could arrive. The actual plan was to go to Egypt and land there.

And they figured they could get to Egypt, but they would be out of food. And so they'd be more of a burden to the Christians in the East than they would be help. So instead, what ended up happening, again, long complicated story, but a young prince, about 13 or 14, Byzantine

prince had been running around Europe trying to get somebody to support him to be the new emperor. And his uncle was the current emperor. And so he convinced the leaders that he would pay them seize of money and joined the crusade with his armies and everything else

if they would just bring him to Constantinople. And they wouldn't even have to fight because the people loved him so much that as soon as they would, They brought him there. They would all overthrow the evil uncle and they would welcome him. So these crusaders were sitting around and figured why not? That's what they, so they did it.

Again, most of the rank and fire were opposed to it. Okay. Because remember, if you were a crusader, I took a vow to go to the Holy Land and fight. Why am I doing all these side trips? Yeah. Constantinople. Yeah, that's right. Why am I going to Constantinople?

All right, so how many knights are bringing this young prince who's got a higher opinion of himself to Constantinople. By that time, there were probably about 8 or 9,000 of them, and then about

another 10,000 Venetians. That's quite an entourage. Yeah, yeah. And plus the Venetians had 50 war galleys, which was state of the art, naval battle.

So they sailed to Constantinople. And the people of Constantinople hate Europeans by this point. So they're not doing anything that the Crusaders say. So they have to attack

the city. Um, there's, they, it's, Constantinople's really too big for them to take, but they do cause some fires. Hey, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm misunderstanding something. So you said earlier that they had no choice but to attack this city in Croatia. And now you're saying they had no choice, but. Oh, no, they had choices. But, so what do you mean?

Why did they have to attack Constantinople? Well, wasn't the point to bring the prince there to shower with gold? Yeah, that was the point. But then once they got there, they realized that the doors were not going to be open to them. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and they, they had already coveted on the, on their, the, the, the, the oaths that they had made to him, that they would bring him there and see to it that he became the emperor. And so since the gates weren't being opened. Oh, that's when, what's what you mean? That's why. Yeah. So they were bound by their, these guys are very much bound by the oaths that they make. They're, um, and so they're very much bound by the oaths. Um, and so they're, so they attack, um, ultimately, uh, uh, these, uh, uh, uh, uh, The current emperor, the evil uncle, Alexius, the third, he flees because he knows he's about to be overthrown. They put in the new young man with his blind old father, and he becomes the new emperor, and everything's good.

And so he pays them about half the money. Okay. He promises. And then decides that that's about all he really wants to pay. Uh-huh. And then eventually tells him to go away. And then basically just goes back on the... entire treaty. Okay. And then tells them that, you know, they better get out of his domain fast

or else they're going to be destroyed. All right. So now you've got a bunch of pissed off nights. Very angry. Very angry. And at this point, they, in fact, one crusader says, we couldn't, we couldn't go back, we couldn't go forward, and we couldn't stay where we were. There was just, they were stuck. Yeah. And so, finally, ultimately, that young boy gets strangled because it's Constantinople and a new... It needs to be a movie made about this young boy. I know. And then the new emperor comes in.

Okay. And he fights the Crusaders a few times, not very well. Ultimately, in 1204, they attack the city, and in a bizarre turn of events, they actually end up getting into the city. And even more bizarre. Bizarre, why? Bizarre, because, I mean, they were able to find a small hole in the walls along the sea walls,

and a small group was able to crawl through it. And then they were able just to take over that part of the city. And the Greeks were so bad that they didn't have the walls. They were horrible fighters that they all just fled. And very soon they had control over a good chunk of the city. Now, the city had more than enough people to fight them. But from the Byzantine culture, in the Byzantine, because it was, the politics were literally Byzantine there. And in that culture, emperors were overturned all the time.

And frequently by military means. And so they had set cultural ways of dealing with this. Generally, if somebody, I mean, Alexius Cominus, who had called for the First Crusade, he had conquered basically Constantinople and become the emperor. So when that happens, the assumption is that this is just a new emperor. And the emperor doesn't want to see a city destroyed. And so you do a big, big ceremony, and you have a procession. And they thought the leader of the crusade, Bonifist and Montferra,

both of whose brothers had been Caesars in the city, that he was the new emperor. And so they came out and they offered the city to him. And they completely misunderstood. Crusaders had no idea of what this was. They just knew, surrender, sack the city. And so for the next three days They sacked the wealthiest city in the world Can you slow down? Can we go into slow motion over these three days?

Tell us about the atrocities that were committed here Yeah, it was pretty bad The now as far as Pure deaths go It's hard to know really how From the best resources that we have Most people just fled These these crusades

And it wasn't just the crusaders I should say There were equally as many Italians Who had been expelled from the city who lived there, and they were also in there, too, because attack, and they knew all the good stuff was. So what they would do is they would go into, because there were palaces all over. I mean, the wealth in Constantinople was enormous. So they would just go to the biggest house they could find, and you'd kick out the owners and take everything. And so you would have just the streams of people.

We have a first-hand account of it, Nikitas Koniades writes about his own experience, leaving the city. He was a senator there. and how they had to run the gauntlet to get out of the city and had to leave everything behind. So enormous amounts of wealth were brought, they were supposed to all be brought together, but most people would just pocket it. Also relics, vast amounts of relics,

because Constantinople was the storehouse of relics. It's really no exaggeration to say that a good chunk of the relics that are currently in Europe came from Constantinople. In fact, the one way you know a relic has a good chance of being real is if it came from Constantinople. So, like the Crown of Thorns. So when the Pope is giving relics back to Bartholomey. That's right. I'm sorry.

Most of them came from them, right. I mean, the Crown of Thorns that's in Notre Dame came from Constantinople. I believe very strongly that the Shrout of Turin came from Constantinople. There was a shroud, there was a shroud exactly like that in a church near Blacarnay in the northern portion of the city. And we have reports of going missing. And I think you can pretty easily tell that it was basically kept under wrap for about a century until it wasn't as hot as it used to be. So I think the shroud of Turin came from that sack too. How are these crusaders who were meant to be on pilgrimage justify these acts?

And can you also talk about what took place in Christian? churches and I've heard things like nuns were being raped on altars and yeah now the nuns and the raping a lot of that happened in the Jerusalem thing with the Seljuk Turks but there were nuns who were raped and other women we know were raped during the oftentimes by the Italians in fact we know one case particularly because we had that eyewitness account from Nikitas who talks about this one Italian guy who during the sack comes with this horse and he just breaks into the group and grabs one of the young women, puts her on the back of the horse, and then takes her to one

of the houses. And the father of this woman is, is like chasing him, and he falls down into the mud, and then he sees some of the crusader knights and begs them to do something. And they do. They go to the house, and they bang open the door and make the guy give the girl back to her father. So there's a whole bunch of different groups who are joining in on this thing. But the Pope was very upset about it, Innocent the Third. And in fact, some of the things that were bad, we know from his letters. It's very interesting to see the letters

because his first letter, when he first hears what happened at Constantinople, he thinks that it's, everything's good, that eventually the city has come under Catholic control and that, you know, now the patriarch of Constantinople will be obedient to the Pope and Rome.

He sees this as divinely ordained and as a wonderful thing. But then over the next week or so, he starts getting word of the sack. Okay. And he is very angry. I mean, the letter that he sends, I mean. Tell us about it. Yeah, he says that, you know, I hear of convents being broken into and the nuns being exposed to the filthiness of the troops.

And I hear of the murder of innocence of the stealing from the poor. I hear, he says, and, you know, you say that the Greeks consider everyone who obeys the Pope to be worse than dogs, well, you've given them a reason to think that now. Now he was very upset by the whole thing. And for him, for innocent, the crusade had just, and the fascinating thing about the Fourth Crusade is no one person planned this. It was. It was, It was basically a bunch of people who kept making compromises to try to keep this thing going. And they wanted, there were many times where they thought they were really going to be able to do something good. We have some of their letters in which they say, you know, with this new deal that we made, we're going to be able to go right to Egypt. In fact, I just sent a letter to the Sultan telling him, he better watch out because we're coming in. And yet it all fell apart into this catastrophe. And the one thing that everyone agreed on, though, both Greeks and Christians, was that it was clearly the work of God.

The Byzantines all knew, because Constantinople had never fallen. I mean, it had withstood armies that were literally ten times larger than that crusade. In fact, more than ten times. And shrugged them off. The fact that this happened, the Greeks, the Byzantines just said, yeah, it's obviously God's punishing us for our sins. And the Crusaders and the West, they were completely agreement. God is punishing you for your sins. And he has now handed over the queen of cities to people who will actually defend the faith instead of making deals with Muslims.

How are they making deals with Muslims? Well, because Isaac II had, you know, made an alliance with Saladin. Okay. So they, in point of fact, though, the city was ruined. And so many people left the city that, I mean, it probably, the metropolitan area probably had a population of about a million when the crusade arrived. Within about 20 years after that, it was around 20,000. most of the city became depopulated. When did the Mohammedans take Constantinople?

That would be in 1453, so about two and a half centuries. Is this when Hagia Sophia was defiled? Yeah, that's when it became, it was turned into a mosque, which it is again now, unfortunately. My priest friend were there praying night prayer, all, what do you say, audaciously and loudly? I have done that myself on occasion. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

So how could we possibly say, thank God for the Crusades or the glory, how could we talk about the glory of the Crusades when this sort of stuff happened? Yeah, I mean, war is deadly. I mean, people are going to die in war. And it's often messy, and it often doesn't go the way you want it to go. The aims of those crusaders, even on the Fourth Crusade, which went so wrong, the aim was to try to restore. the holy sites. Yeah. Now, it failed miserably, but that was their hope.

Is this where it dissipated in Constantinople, or did some end up in Jerusalem? Because of all, remember all those people that didn't go to Venice? They all ended up going to the Holy Land. Yeah. And there was a fair number of them. But the king of Jerusalem, who was in Ocker at this point, it was a government in exile, he was not going to, he had a truce. with the Muslim powers at the time.

And so he did not want to break it unless the full army was there. So there was, they didn't have anything to do. Most of them just, they waited around a while and then they just went home. There was really nothing for them to do. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, they were, many people were celebrating

this conquest of Constantinople and all these relics coming back. And so it was, it was definitely a major change. And that's the point where people would usually say clearly there's a schism because they'll spend so many decades after this trying to heal the schism between the...

And I'll tell you, Greeks today still don't forget 1204. It will often... It's often brought up in Catholic Orthodox dialogue. It is. In fact, when John Paul II, when he visited, I think it was in 99 maybe. He visited Greece and met with the Archbishop of Athens, Christodolos.

And it was the only place that he went where he wasn't greeted with love. I mean, he was greeted with protests. And Christodolos read to him a welcome address, which was all about the Fourth Crusade. And Frankish Greece, because they took over Greece after that. and how, you know, Greece still bears the wounds of this. And in 1204, I mean, 2004 on the 800-year anniversary, the Pope again asked for forgiveness for the Fourth Crusade, although the Pope did everything good to stop it, yeah.

Condemned it. And then, you know, they had a mass together with the patriarch of Constantinople in Rome, and that type of thing. So, but it's still, it's still very much remembered. But there were many other crusaders and great crusaders. I mean, the great crusader of St. Louis, the king of France, who went on two crusades, who devoted him.

He's a saint. I mean, he devoted himself to God very strongly, very holy man. But he believed that his greatest cause. was to restore Jerusalem, to end the humiliation of what they saw as the humiliation of Christ in his homeland being taken and stolen from him in this way. Or sometimes they would refer to it as the Virgin's dowry had been stolen by the Muslims. And so he wanted, one of the things that impelled him to be a better king, a good Christian king, was he wanted to be good enough that God would give him that gift to restore Jerusalem.

And he died on his second crusade in 1270 and never was able to, never was able to do it. But very holy man. Most people nowadays remember him for all of the holy things he would do. He would wash lepers and invite the poor to the king's table and would hear just, you know, sit under the tree to give justice to anyone who would come to him. So, great man. But no, I always living in St. Louis, I will, I often will tell various priests, I say, you know, on the feast of St. Louis, everyone talks about all those other things, you know, he did.

But he would have been very surprised because for him, the crusade was, was the most important thing he did. That's where he poured most of his energy into, was trying to restore Jerusalem. All right. So I think if you look up how many crusades that were there, and I know you're saying there was innumerable. Yeah. There's usually, what, nine do people say, eight, nine? Usually, yeah, usually the, as far as the numbers go, the first five, if you say those, everyone knows what you mean.

Once you get past five, it gets a little weird because right after the Fifth Crusade, you have the Crusade of Frederick the Second. And a lot of people either say that's Sixth Crusade, but some say it's part of the Fifth Crusade. really know. So his crusade historians will usually refer to it just as the fifth, the five first, first, first, first, five crusades. And then, and then you call them other names. So the crusade, the first crusade of Louis the ninth, second crusade of Louis the ninth, the baron's crusade, um, the, uh, and then, uh, later, um, post 1291 crusades of like, Nicop, the crusade of Nicopolis or things like that. All right, do this for me. I want you to rank the top, the first five crusades in order, as far as the most successful to the least successful, and just

kind of give me a sentence about each as to why. Yeah, so the first crusade is obviously the most successful because it conquers Jerusalem. The third crusade is probably the next most successful because it conquers all of the coast, except for Ascalon. Ansela restores all of that. Boy, it's hard to find one. I guess it goes heavily down from there. All right. So one, three. If we call the Reconquista, if we call the whole Reconquista a crusade, which is the Spanish Crusades, then that was successful because they ultimately ended up conquering all of it.

Is that part of the one through five? No. I gave you very strict rules. Oh, sorry. That's okay. I can only use those five. That's right. It's all you're like to do.

Oh, no. Then I would say the fourth crusade was number three then. because at least they conquered a new kingdom. They conquered Constantinople and created the Latin Empire after that. So if something came of it, so they, I guess I would put the Fifth Crusade next because at least they conquered Damietta for a while in Egypt.

But then they lost it. And then the Second Crusade would be the worst. All right. What is, was the children's crusade? So I have to say, I don't think I've ever in my career as a crusade of story and not been asked about that because people always know it. Okay, this is what I always say, that children's crusade was not a crusade and it was not made up of children.

I mean, it's essentially, it's basically the product of all of this piety that I was talking about, where everyone is thinking about the state of the Holy Land. And by the 13th century, it happens in 1212. By the 13th century, you have a lot of people who are saying, why do the Crusades keep failing? Why is it that, I mean, we've done everything we can. It must be you guys. It must be you knights and you kings. You live such immoral lives.

God's not going to do this. And so you start to get these kind of popular uprisings where common people will kind of rally around some charismatic preacher and they will suddenly say, you know, God is calling me to go to the Holy Land. And that, you know, if the poor come, he will hand it over to us

because God, you know, Jesus loves the poor. So you get a couple of these that pop up in 1212, which is what's known as the Children's Crusade, once in France. But the main one that most people are thinking about kind of goes around this teenager guy, Nicholas of Cologne, who starts to attract a bunch of people. And they all, people begin thinking that, you know, the Holy Spirit is at work here. And so he says that he has been given a message that God wants them to march to the Mediterranean at which point he will dry up the Mediterranean so that they can walk across it.

And then they will be victorious and they'll walk into Jerusalem. And so they've marched south along the Rhine and massively popular. They get bigger and bigger. The reason it's called the Children's Crusade, I mean there were some children, I suppose, but most of the people were just commoners, peasants and that sort. people with pitchforks literally and the sources for this

crusade there's no monks on it there's no priests there's no bishops who can write something that we can read so we see it from our sources from monasteries and bishops who are watching it go by and they don't like it they think this is ridiculous and so when they talk about it they refer to them as as prairie

which in Latin is boys or children, but that was also a common term used for lower classes. So what they mean is just lower class people, peasants. So it's not just a bunch of children, it's a bunch of peasants. And they're making their way South. Ultimately, they do, it's quite a major event. They do get down to the Alps. They finally managed to cross the Alps. They're being funded by people the whole way, because everyone wants to be part of this. And then when they get to the Veneto, they kind of split up. Some of them head towards closer towards Venice.

Some of them head towards Genoa. They get to the water and it doesn't dry up. And that's kind of the end because they don't have any money to go anywhere. And not only that, they don't have the money to get home. Because, you know, they don't have any money anyway. And although, why, while they were going, they were, you know, everyone was celebrating them. But now coming back, they're not going to get celebrated.

So they really have nowhere to go. And then some of the others go to Genoa. There's a long tradition. And I think it's probably true that those that finally made it to Genoa, a number, the water didn't dry up. And a lot of Genoese merchants said, oh, well, you know, it's okay. God sent me, I'll take you on my boat, free of charge. And so they get on the boat and next stop is the Alexandrian slave markets where they end up. But there are still in Genoa, there are still some families today that claim to be descendants of the children's crusade.

But yeah, as I said, it was never a crusade. In fact, Innocent III, who was the Pope at the time, issued a statement saying that this is not a crusade. He praised their zeal and said he wished the knights would have this kind of zeal, but it was not a crusade now. What's one thing you would like the world to know about the crusades? I'm sure you've already said it, but if God kind of gave you a gift to communicate to all of mankind, something, some true thing about the crusades, what is it you want us to know? I mean, I think it's that they were defensive wars that were a devotional practice. that they were not colonialist, they were not imperialist, they had nothing to do. There was no home country.

This was something that done by men who believed that this was what God wanted them to do, and that ultimately did have a major effect in slowing the advance of Islam. And it gave Europe that breathing room that it needed in order to ultimately flourish, once it got to the 16th and 17th centuries, I find it amazing that throughout human history, that Europe, this broken down culture that was so weak and fractious that it suddenly exploded in the 16th and 17th centuries

to become a culture unlike any other in human history that went planetary all over the globe. And suddenly the struggle with Islam, which had exercised everyone's mind, suddenly just seemed like, you know, toys that you played with as a kid. It doesn't matter anymore. And people forgot that the danger was so grave

that it really was, massive danger. So the Crusades are what gave Europe that breathing room that allowed it to last long enough to have that explosion onto a... and allowed Christianity, therefore, to explode all over the world in missionaries. There are many beautiful, faithful Catholic men and women throughout Europe. I spent some time in Croatia. I was shocked at how beautiful those people were and how every church I would pop into.

You've got these young and old people kneeling, praying the Holy Rosary. Okay, so for sure there's a lot of good Catholics throughout Europe. And yet there is an Islamification of European cities in particular, but even in the countryside, that cannot be denied. I saw one study that said if not one more Muslim immigrated to Europe, Europe will be predominantly Muslim in like 50 years or something. What's your thought on that? Yeah, I mean. I think that's, sorry, real quick, I think that even though there are good faithful Catholics throughout Europe, we've also abandoned Jesus Christ.

Yeah, I mean, Europe has, I think. Many of us. Yeah, I think in Croatia in places like that, I think you're right. But so much of Europe has become post-Christian. This is what I mean. So in a way, this idea of we're being punished could be thought of when you abandon Jesus Christ and allow the Mohammedans to... Yeah. I mean, you think of...

I mean, I spend a lot of time in Italy, and, you know, there's no one in the churches. Particularly, I mean, in Rome, you're going to always find people in the church because it's the headquarters. It's the what? The headquarters of the Catholic Church. So, you know, there's going to be people there. But, you know, elsewhere in Italy, you go to church. on Sunday. There's a couple of very old women. That's about it, except maybe on Easter, but otherwise there's no one there. And it's just become, it's become just a cultural

artifact. And there's nothing left of it. They're museums. It's so offensive to go into these beautiful churches these days to me. I just spent six, seven months in Austria and we went all over the place. And it's true. It's heartbreaking to go into what is essentially museums, there's all sorts of QR codes for you to scan to donate money to a church that's somehow technically owned by the state in France at least another place. Yeah, and I think of it all the time. You go into these medieval or Renaissance churches. They're beautiful, ornate.

You know, the people in those parishes paid for that because it was so important to them. The side altars that each one had their own organizations that put those side altars together and paid for every component in that. And they were very, very filled with faith. And you're right, now in the modern age, it's just gone. At least in Europe, it's gone. I mean, the United States is much more faithful. I mean, there's more people in the church.

I have a friend who's English. And I brought him once to my church in St. Louis. And when he walked in, he just said, a pastor would kill for a congregation like this. As an Australian, I want to tell all my American listeners to stand up straight with your shoulders back, praise Jesus Christ for the good work he has begun and is continuing in this country. So many good apostolots. Yeah, there is. There really are. You really are.

So what's the hope for Europe, or is there no hope left? They might not be. Might not be. Yeah. I mean, it's not. Christ didn't promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against Europe. Not Europe. That's exactly right.

Yeah. And, you know, the church began in Jerusalem, began in the Near East. Egypt used to be the most Christian area of the world. So, and those have long, you know, since fallen away, although there's still plenty of, you know, Coptic Christians in Egypt. God bless them. Yeah. Yeah.

But still, those areas, you know, so history comes ago, it's what Augustine told us in the city of God. You know, empires fall and empires rise. but it's the kingdom of, it's the city of God, the kingdom of heaven that's eternal. And by keeping your eyes on that, that's the real, that's the real, that's the history of salvation is the thing that matters more than the city of man. So it's not surprising that over time. In fact, I think it's, it demonstrates once again the, the resilience of the Catholic Church and the movement of the Holy Spirit through the,

the Catholic Church that it goes where the spirit is. And so if Europe doesn't want it anymore, then that's fine. It'll go where the spirit is. People are watching. They're fascinated. You've wedded their appetite and they want to know where they can go to learn more. Is there a book or several of yours that you would point people to, maybe an online course? Yeah. I mean, I do have a book. It's called Hard to, Hard to remember title. It's called The Concise History of the Crusades. So that book is, it's concise, but it goes through all of the Crusades. For more, that book actually would lead you to almost all the other major books.

I have written a couple books on the Fourth Crusade. And I do have online, if you go to Audible, I have courses on there on Crusades as well. Yeah, well, we will, Maria, who's listening right now, our producer will link it in the description below. Okay. If you can go check it out. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to. Yeah, my pleasure.