School of War - Ep 65: John Hosler on Jerusalem

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

John Hosler, Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and author of Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace, joins the show to talk about the wars, and the peace, of medieval Jerusalem. ▪️ Times  • 01:26 Introduction  • 01:46 Why care about medieval military history? • 07:22 What is it about Jerusalem?  • 12:45 Continuities • 16:19 The Byzantines and the Jews • 23:54 The Arabs arrive  • 29:42 An “evidentiary problem” • 33:59 Three hundred years of peace • 36:29 Causes of the First Crusade • 40:36 The Crusaders • 42:32 Siege and conquest • 44:23 A Christian city • 47:31 The Crusader States  • 49:29 The Knights Templar

Salem, Helosolima, El Kudz, Bait al-Makdis, the Holy City, the City of Peace. It's hard to say which of this earth's cities have been fought over the most, but any list will need to include Jerusalem, the object of desire for three of the world's major religions, steeped in bloodshed from its earliest days until its most recent, but also in periods of relatively stable cooperation and coexistence. Today we'll talk about the patterns of peace in war with respect to medieval Jerusalem and about what causes men to give their lives for the city of peace. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people are not seen. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. and shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome today, John D. Hosler, who is the Professor of Military History at the Command in General Staff College and author most recently of Jerusalem Falls, Seven Centuries of War and Peace. John, thank you so much

for joining the show. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So before we get into the military history, of medieval Jerusalem, which is our subject today, I'd be interesting just to hear a little bit about you and how you got into this subject matter generally. And, you know, you teach military officers, I presume predominantly U.S. Army officers about military history and strategy. One, tell us a little bit about yourself

and how you got into this field. And two, explain the relevance of your specialty to what, you know, majors and lieutenant colonels and so forth want to need to learn today. Right. So, you know, I've been doing military history for a long time. Before I came here to CGSC, I was actually at a tenured post out in Baltimore, Maryland for about 12 years. So I was, you know, teaching history there and then researching military affairs and that sort of thing. I concentrated on all that in graduate school and decided to come out here because I wanted the experience of being in this military history department. We have a whole department for it here, right? All told, I think we have 30 or 31 military historians. working through our department. So it's this great nexus of sort of intellectual activity. And I wanted to be a part of that. So it's something I've been studying my whole career. Here at CGSC, it's a little different because, you know, as you mentioned, yeah, my officers are, they're all captain promotables

or majors, predominantly Army, but we have all of the sister services here as well, as well as interagency personnel as well. So sometimes all the students from the State Department or, you know, Merchant Marine or USAID or something like that. And their interest really is much more in what we call applied history, right? So they're going to go off and serve as officers on staffs, battalion-level staffs. They're going to have to do planning. They're going to be exos, that sort of thing. And we're trying to give them some historical context and some knowledge to inform their future decision-making. So that's what we do with history. here, and we all teach the same thing for most of the year, all of our faculty, which really is

not in my particular research field at all. We start with the 17th century in the Netherlands, and then we move forward and we just wrapped up a couple weeks ago with Operation Iraqi Freedom. So it's much more in the modern scope of things. My role here is to teach my specialty in the electives period, which is about to start where we have opportunities. So I'll teach courses on medieval warfare, the Crusades, the medieval Near East, that sort of thing. And to answer your second question, I think the pitch I make any way to legitimize myself here is if you are a military professional and you are deploying to Centcom or if you've been in Centcom or if you want to know about the issues in that part of the world, you really have

to know medieval history. It's inescapable. You can't go there and not know it. the level of your ignorance would be profound because it's in the Middle Ages that Islam is founded. It is in the Middle Ages that the heart of a lot of the disputes that go on in the Middle East can really be found. They all originate in the several centuries of the Middle Ages period. So what I tell them is I say, look, yeah, we're studying bladed weapons and horseback charges and castle sieges. And this is not how you operate anymore.

and I'm not going to try to convince you it ever will be, but the principles behind them remain largely the same. How do you run operations in an expeditionary sense? We're going to 3,000 miles away from home, with a coalition of

allies who don't necessarily speak the same languages against a common enemy, which itself is disintegrated and has really no unity whatsoever. They're Turks or Arabs or Bedouins or Kurds or what have you, it's a fractured environment much like today.

And so navigating all the challenges of moving an army to the Near East, of operating, of sustaining, of fighting, of keeping the force together in adverse conditions, all of those remain the same. You're using vehicles instead of horses and ox-driven carts. But the ideas are still the same. And more over the medieval period contains something that I don't think the officers get very much of here or really anywhere else in professional military education. And that's the religious aspect. When you do medieval history, it's inescapable. And so my class is we talk a lot about just war, holy war, crusade, jihad, the notions undergirding this, the law undergirding it, the theology, all the different movements. and I try to stress to them that it's great to look at,

you look at operational planning, you look at the terrain and the politics and the time and all these things you need to wage a good campaign, but you can't forget those cultural things. And even though today we may look back and say, well, the First Crusade, that was almost a thousand years ago. That doesn't matter anymore. The reality is different in the Middle East.

People, even if they don't know much about it, they remember the time of the Crusades in a generalized sense. And so I try to equip them for being out there, and not just equip them for a particular job they're going to have, but for being in the area and understanding something about it. That's really interesting. And then on this subject of Jerusalem specifically, and I realize I could ask this question and turn out my mic

and just sort of sit back for the next few days. But with less time on the clock than that, because there are other questions I'd like to ask, what is it about Jerusalem that makes it the focus of such intense and repeated military, campaigning because it's not just to steal some observations from your book. It's not a site of particular physical strategic significance and seems not to have been, at least in recorded memory. So what is it about Jerusalem that everyone is always fighting over it? Yeah, you're absolutely right.

It's the holy sites. There are other lingering aspects of it in terms of, you know, heritage of certain groups and tribes that had resided there for a long time. And you do have some kinds of those connections. At one point, it's a, you know, it's a frontier outpost of the Byzantine Empire. And so it's viewed as a defensive, as a part of the defensive scheme and so important for that. But at the heart of it, really, it's the holy sites. And there's a huge debate over the significance of those sites for Islam and when exactly they become prominent. And the specialists will go back and forth about, well, you know, when was the Temple Mount absolutely critical to Islam? The story is that the Prophet Muhammad went there during the night journey, but that doesn't

necessarily mean that the site itself was revered consistently. And so it does take a while, we think, with the Muslim side to recognize these places as absolutely critical. But there is no doubt that before Islam was a religion, the city is critical for Judaism and Christianity in a spiritual sense. Because you have the site of the temple, Solomon's temple and then Herod's temple after that, and you have the Church of the Holy Sepulcher standing over the purported site of Jesus' resurrection,

is his burial and resurrection. And so for two of the three Abrahamic religions, those roots run incredibly deep, and the city has tremendous meaning. And then for Islam, it develops meaning over time. And by the time you get to the age of the Crusades, everybody thinks that's an important city. And that's not just, I would say, because of physical buildings and kind of moments in history where you can say, well, this happened on this spot.

That is a big part of it. But increasingly what medievalists have been looking at is sort of the next part of the story. If you look at this from an apocalyptic point of view, all those sites are likewise crucial in the age expected to come, ushering in the end of the world. And these are what we call eschatological notions about end times. So you have a situation where, you know, important things happen then. Important things are going on there now and the most important things are still to come, which means it will always remain. It must always remain a place of significance from a religious point of view. And I think that's what makes it different from the other cities around that are better connected to trade routes, frankly with bigger populations, more bustling

economies. You can think for most of the book, You think of cities like Tyre and Damascus and Cairo. These are much bigger metropolitan, this bad dad especially, much bigger, you know, metropolitans with cosmopolitan populations and major trade and economic roles. And then you have a little Jerusalem sitting off the trade routes, never amounting to more than 30,000 people living there at any time in the Middle Ages, usually much smaller. But it has the holy sites. And because of that, it is forever different.

Yeah, it's that studying Jerusalem seems to me like a fascinating way to study repeated examples of politics and of military action conducted less with material interests in mind and more with, if you like, and you might have a better way to phrase this, but sort of idealistic concerns in mind. We really are fighting for, you know, we're talking about jihads or crusades or what have you, sort of talking about fighting over ideas, right, and conceptions. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, there's not much to be gained by actually. actually taking the physical city of Jerusalem. It's a fortified city. It's an outpost.

There's, there's not a massively plentiful supply of water. It's, it doesn't live amongst fields where you can grow all of this wonderful, you know, produce to consume. It's really more for the, and, and that's one thing that, that historians have kind of centered out because sort of the idea of Jerusalem, not only the physical possession of it, but just what it means to people. Having that is important, whether, and we see lots of onlookers, I think of somebody like Saladin, for example,

the expectation of the Muslim intellectual community is that he needs to get the city back. Most of that community has never been to Jerusalem. There's no photography. They haven't seen pictures of it, right? They don't have any connection with it, but it becomes an imperative. You have to get that city for what it means.

And that's a very powerful, powerful draw. Indeed. True to this day. So I'm looking here towards the back of your book at the start of your back matter. There's this wonderful table of all the times. in the period that you've, you've selected for the books, so running from the 7th century through to the 13th century,

all the times that Jerusalem changed hands in, you know, coercive fashion. I think I just counted, so by number, but be it looks like 19, 19 separate occasions that you were chronicling. Yeah, and that's, and there's kind of a funny story about that. I counted 19 and we went to press and I said, okay, 19 stages of Jerusalem. And you know what happens, right? As soon as I approved the proofs for the book, I found a 20th. So it's, it's,

It's really, I think it's really 20, but, you know, 1920. Fix it in the paperback. Fix it in the paperback. So why don't we, well, let me actually, let me ask a broad question and then we can zoom in on some of these. The broad question is, you know, what are the continuities over these, what, seven centuries of warfare? What are the patterns that reemerged over and over again?

So for continuity, and we've already alluded to this a little bit, the draw is certainly, you know, a continuous thing. I think the major one that I found for that I argue for in the book is the counterintuitive one. Normally people would say the theme is warfare. The theme is conflict, holy strife. And I think, yeah, there is that if you want to look at all the events, obviously 19 or 20 attacks on the city, that's a lot. I would say, though, that that's across 600 years. So you can't space those out a little bit, and there's one period that goes over 300 years where there's no attacks at all, right?

So there's a concentration of them in the high Middle Ages period. So what that led to me to consider is whether there's another theme. And the one I argue for is that the theme is actually, and I always hesitate using this word because it means something different now, is what I would call tolerance, not in the modern sense, but in the medieval sense, the idea that we have in this city a diverse group of people praying in different ways, believing in different things from different ethnic backgrounds, all different persuasions, who probably don't like each other very much, but have over the centuries found a way to live with each other, to tolerate the mere presence of the person next door.

While at the same time, really wishing that, you know, that person was actually a Muslim or that person was actually a Christian, I don't like what they believe in. But that's a neighbor, that's a customer in my store, that's a part of the community. And for better or worse, we're kind of all in this together. And I've been able to track, I think, over 600 years that as, what I would say, the dominant theme of life in Jerusalem. And it makes it different than other places in the near eastern world during the Middle Ages that don't have that, where you have much more constant civil strife, much more constant warfare. I mean, 20 attacks on Jerusalem is one thing. I cannot, I don't think I can even count the times Damascus has been attacked. It's off the charts, right?

It's always getting attacked. And in places like that, you don't have these, these kind of wonderful communities with people praying next to each other, whereas in Jerusalem, you really do. There's this one anecdote I point out in the 11th century where things are getting a little gritty in the holy city. And one of the Muslim law schools, the Maliki school, I believe, decides to pick up and move. They say, look, life is no good here. There's, you know, there's been some problems. We're going to move and we're going to go to Tire. So we're just moving.

We're taking, picking up the law school and we're moving. And what's shocking is before they do, they go to their Jewish compatriots in town and they say, hey, you should get your Yeshiva and bring it with us. Why don't we go to Tire together? And you see this very strange things to a Jewish law school and a Muslim law school. They pick up their roots. They pack up all their students. And together they move over to Tire because it's a much more interesting city and it's a safer place to be.

That absolutely extraordinary. that is not the kind of thing you hear about or even think about when you think about, you know, the age of the Crusades. And yet that happens, that event happens not too long before the First Crusade arrives. Well, let's go to the start of your account. And there are a couple of, the first one is pretty, I take your point, but the first handover of Jerusalem that you chronicle in the book, right, which is a Persian seizure from the Byzantines, if I'm not mistaken. And paint us a picture of what Jerusalem means to the Byzantines and to the Christians and Jews who live there at the beginning of the 7th century. What do they have in their minds?

You know, that's a great question because you do have a Christian and Jewish community in Jerusalem at the time. They are living side by side. But their outlook on life and our sources are very sketchy. They're always very, very partial in this particular part of the 7th century. So we don't have a great grasp on what they were thinking. But if I were to speculate, I would say life is a lot more rosy there under, if you're a Christian living under Byzantine rule than it is for the Jews. The city has its meaning clearly. I mean, there is a church built over the holy tomb for the Christians.

It does have the wood of the purported true cross that Jesus died on. And then you also have Jews in the city, worshiping and caring about their daily lives. But at that time, life was pretty difficult for Jews in that period of the Byzantine Empire. The Emperor Heraclius is not known as a friend of Judaism. He carried out, later he would carry out a directed pogrom against all Jews in North Africa and the Middle East, in which you have forced conversions and executions and these sorts of things. But even before that happens, there are a number of oppressive actions taken by the Byzantines to drive out Jews from their customary neighborhoods in different cities to discriminate against them

and even put them to death. So life is not good if you were a Jew at that time. You can maintain, in a sense, you can endure it. But it's certainly not anyone's idea of a paradise or a pleasant living. And when the Persians show up, you kind of see this because they're coming from a non-Christian, non-Jewish persuasion. There doesn't appear to be any really religious motivation. when they come to the city in 614, they're there for plunder as part of a larger war.

And you see the Jews very quickly jump to the side of the Persians, right? They join in with the attackers, which tells you a lot about what's going on inside the city. Normally it'd be the reverse. It'd be that the besieged mentality. We all have to work together or we're all going to die. And instead, it's no, we're with the, you call them bad guys. We're with them because we're frankly sick of how you've been treating us. Yeah.

In your account of the sort of a series of linked episode, This combination of civil strife and then, you know, foreign invaders, despite the sort of overlay of Abrahamic religions, it could be an episode out of Thucydides, right? Like all the same sort of dynamics of a city tearing itself apart because of the tensions built into the city. And then you have, you know, a foreign marauder that's being sort of dragged into those politics that felt very familiar. Yeah, I would, I would agree. I think if you look at any, any city that's under siege for a considerable amount of time, you're right. point out, whether it's Athens, right, whether it's Rome or Jerusalem or someplace else, you're going to have those kinds of fights that go on. You know, for Jerusalem, the most famous one

is the one I don't cover in the book, really, is the Roman sack of 70 AD, where, you know, Josephus's account is just, I mean, everyone is turning against everyone. And if you are insufficiently zealous, then the garrison itself is going to come after you, you know, and the deprivations that are in the city and eating shoe leather in those. kinds of things to survive. All of that, the longer siege goes on is just get magnified and magnified. And as you point out, in, you know, in 614, there had been some problems in the city anyway. You have this rampant gang warfare that's going on and these kind of localized retributive acts, which is already setting a tone of this isn't exactly a unified community, right?

The Persians show up at the perfect time to attack. So the Jewish community then sort of quite rationally in a way aligns itself. with the Persians. How does that work out for the Jewish community when the Byzantines come back? So, yeah, it works out for them in the short term, but not in the long term, for sure. And there's these sort of sort of accusations of Jews ransoming Christian prisoners and executing them and these sorts of things. It's a little murky what happens when the siege is over. There is some, I would throw it in the genre of apocalyptic literature that makes the claim that there was actually a sort of Jewish governorship of the city very soon after the siege ended, where it was

actually the Jews running the show. And no one agrees on that because the evidence you read it, and you're like, ooh, this is, yeah, if you look at it in one way, I suppose, but the other way, it's very difficult to do good source critique on it. So, but it seems to be regardless, two, three years pass where you have is pretty pleasant living. And then in the larger context of the war between Byzantium and Persia, Emperor Heraclius starts to turn things around. And he starts to succeed. And in the 620s, he's going to win his war against Persia. And when that happens, the people who stood against the Byzantines, you sort of have

to know that the hammer is about to drop. And it's not for nothing as Heraclius approaches Jerusalem as he's, supposedly as he's riding towards the city, a group of Jews goes out and sort of meets with him way down the trail and says, hey, can we make a deal, right? so that you want, can we preserve some rights here? And he's very amenable to these, you know, he's riding high off a successful campaign and he wants to be generous, these sorts of things. And he agrees.

And he says, yeah, you know, don't worry, we're not going to, we're not going to do anything to you. Jews are safe. And then as soon as he gets to the city, it all changes because the local monks start beg him to, begging him to take revenge because they blame the Jews for all of the disasters. And that's when the pogroms start. And it's a series of very ugly episodes with some, frankly, a stout. There's one, I think of the monks who say, you know, Heraclius says, well, I can't kill all the Jews.

That's murder, right? Isn't murder against the commandments? And they say, no, no, no, don't worry about it. What we'll do is we'll, we'll fast. We'll go on a fast for you. We won't eat eggs, you know, for however many years. And we'll intercede with God and you'll be okay in front of the big guy. And they, and then sort of given the clearance by the monastic establishments, all right, well, you know, game on. And then you turn this bloody corner. So the Jews have, you know, this brief interlude where they're free of the Christian imperial rule, but it does not last very long. And the punishments are going to be meted out as soon as the as soon as the Byzantines get the city in their possession again.

So staying here again towards the front of the account for a while. So this all occurs, the Byzantines, the Romans, whatever we want to call them, we're back in charge. Meanwhile, down in Arabia, things have been percolating. And I realize we're about to wander into deep waters here. You alluded to this earlier. It's funny you. I should say, by the way, as we chat, the book is really, like a really expertly done essay.

That's just navigating, essay in the best, broadest sense of the term, that's just navigating through what is clearly just dizzying, dizzingly complex contradictory source material. And for readers who, you know, are not themselves scholars of the period doing so in a way that does make it possible to follow and learn from, you know, what it is we actually can know about the period in a way that feels very relevant. So I thank you for that. It was a blast for the past for me. You referenced Patricia Crohn's Hagerism, which takes me back to graduate school. But so things are percolating down in Arabia. Ultimately, this will result in a Muslim, or an Arab seizure of Jerusalem.

Why do the Arabs come to Jerusalem? So there's a couple answers, I think. One is that it is a outpost garrison protecting the southern edge of Syria. it does need to be taken in order to really have the kind of authority, the territorial authority you want, right? This is on the heels two years beforehand in 636. The Arabs had won this smashing victory at the Battle of Yarmuk. So, and then Heraclius famously bids adieu to Syria. It says, so long, good luck, you know, but I'm leaving.

And you know that you have these towns on the ropes. One by one, they're going to fall. It's just a matter of time. So if you want to extend the territories of these, these Rashidun, Caliphs, these successors, then you have to take it, right? You need it in your wheelhouse. On the other hand, there's also that religious straw, right? And this is where some of the confusion comes in with the early Arabic specialists.

How much do those holy sites mean to the conqueror whose name is Khalif Umar, Ibn al-Katab? How much does it mean to him? Is he taking the city for religious purposes because he's got? some notion these are sites holy to Islam, or is it more just kind of the political, you know, this is part of my domains now. I argue, I think, it gets back to that point I raised earlier about the apocalypticism, that he's got that on his mind. The most famous Arab account of this early period is written by a historian named Al Tabari, who commands just tremendous respect for his scholarship. And he makes the point that Umar was asking about the gate of mercy on his

way to Jerusalem. And that's a reference to what we today call the Golden Gate. It's a gate on the eastern edge of the Temple Mount, where, according to Muslim belief, this is where the Antichrist will be defeated before end times. And the Golden Gate figures into Christian and Jewish eschatological stories as well. So to me, I look at that and say, well, if Altabari is telling the truth, and he's writing kind of a ways after the event, but if he is telling the truth, it sounds like Umar is captivated on the religious sentiment here. Two other things I think go into that. One is recent scholarship.

There's been some great books out about early millinarianism and Islam and how much of the Quran is actually dedicated to end times discussion. The argument being that it's a lot more than people want to give it credit. So that discussion is taking place. Umar himself was skeptical that a guy like Muhammad could even die. When it happens, he refuses to believe it. So these ideas of this early nascent Islamic ideas about the salvation, the end times, messianic things are all kind of floating around. It's in discussion at the time.

This is 638. It's only been a few years since Muhammad's death, right? Yeah. So there's that. The other piece, I think, is we tend to forget when you ask modern people about Muslims and how they pray. Muslims pray towards Mecca today. It's very common. But in the beginning, they didn't.

In the beginning, the so-called kibah, the direction of prayer was to Jerusalem. And it's not in the Quran. It's in the hadith. It's in the various sayings attributed to Muhammad. But it's very clear they were praying in the direction of Jerusalem for quite a long time in the beginning, right? And eventually that does shift down to Mecca. But I think when you look at all that and say, well, there's tradition of prayer towards that direction. There is this discussion about end times.

And Umar himself possibly was personally asking. about it. To me, my conclusion was, and I'd happy to be disputed on it, because frankly, the evidence is, it's thin either way you go. I tend to see it as he wants the city for religious purposes. And in the agreement, when he actually receives the city, there's an agreement with the local patriarch called Umar's Assurance. You know, he essentially gives the rest of the city to the Christians. He says, look, well, I'm, you know, I'm in charge. You have to pay taxes. But you can keep all your holy buildings. You can worship however you want, but the temple mount. is for Muslims, right?

Which had been used as a garbage heap up until that point. Christians, what do they care about the foundations of the first temple or this prophet they've never heard of before? But for Umar, it was absolutely essential. As soon as he enters the city, he goes right to the temple mount and kneels down to pray. So to me, I think it's the religious significance. That's why you take it. Yes, you need to include it in your domains like most other frontier outposts of the old

Byzantine realm. But it's that significance. attributed to him is the building of the first mosque on the Temple Mount as well. So now, if that's true, now he's building a religious building. And for me, those pieces, they seem to make sense. And just to unpack it for listeners who, you know, could be forgiven if they have not made a careful study of the 620s and 630s and all the attendant complexities and resources. Yeah, I just want to be clear what we're talking about, which is, and, you know, feel free to challenge this characterization of it. But what we are on some level, what we are talking about is, when does Islam,

as we understand it today and as it understands itself today, take that form, which is to say the account in Islam, or I should say that the account in early Islamic histories and texts is relatively straightforward on the questions that we are dealing with right here, right? You know, Jerusalem matters for a whole series of very obvious straightforward reasons to include Muhammad's, you know, nighttime journey and so forth. Like there's a clear sort of liturgical religious series of reasons why Jerusalem would matter. and as you get into the sources in a more detailed fashion as you have, it's less clear what was actually the case at the time

versus what appears to be the case in histories that actually are written hundreds of years later. Is that fair? No, I think that's absolutely fair. The first century of Islam is a thriving area of study right now and people are fascinated with it. You have a, frankly, it's an evidentiary problem. You're talking about the early days here, right?

So it's, the Quran is still being compiled. If you're Muslim, you say, well, those are prophecies, right, and they're, you know, they'd been around a long time. But they had been uttered by Muhammad in the process of writing them down and putting them together, which takes less than 50 years, right, to it. But you're in that period of assembling the Quran, right? And most of our Arabic sources that are written by Muslims who have kind of the window into that are written much later. So that's a real problem. So you say, okay, well, if I want to know about the 620s and 630s, where do I got my evidence from? And the problem is you have to get it from Christian sources.

Those are the contemporary sources. And of course, they are, you know, they have the whole set of biases and their proximity is not as close as you would want. They're not in the court of these caliphs. So how do you treat that evidence? Do you use it? Do you use the earliest Christian sources? Do you rely on the later Muslim sources? Do you do a combination?

There's a scholar named Robert Hoyland who spent a lot of time trying to untie all of this. And the result is I think what you, you stated very well is it's an ongoing debate. When did formalized Islam become a thing? When were converts openly welcomed into the ranks? I mean, one thing that Hoyland demonstrates is even in the early conquests, nobody really knew what to do with a defeated enemy who wanted to convert to Islam, particularly if they're not Arabic, right? If they're of a different ethnicity, what do you do with such a person? Can they convert? Can we, can they fight for us? These are all questions that had to be sorted out.

So the seventh and eighth centuries are one of those muddy periods, and it's just sort of endlessly fascinating. Yeah, no, I remember being fascinated. And it was sort of exhilarating, actually, because it was so kind of off the wall, honestly, the Krona Cook argument in haggerism, which I'm only talking about because you sounded surprised me when you made reference to it. But if I recall correctly, and it's been a few years, you know, the strongest form of the argument was methodologically involved, sort of like, what happens if we actually do

just set aside the Muslim sources as being late and therefore unhelpful. We'll just work with that kind of methodological prejudice. And so we just look at contemporary sources. So we're looking at Greek and Middle Persian and all that kind of stuff. And the picture that they at the time, this is the 70s, I guess, claimed emerged, was a picture of almost something that looked kind of like a Jewish erodentist movement, which is just kind of a crazy, you know, it's certainly not how the formative period of Islam is understood by Muslims. And I mean, I don't, I don't know that it has much broader purchase actually beyond that book. But it was a fascinating and kind of wild read speaking to, you know, the kinds of things that can emerge depending on how you look at the evidence.

Right. And, you know, Crohn's work is excellent. And the scholarship is so good. But that book made a huge splash was a tremendously controversial. And she has to some degree kind of pulled back a little bit since then. And, you know, the problem is not to get too deep into the sort of the historiography of it is the argument has been made that those late Muslim sources actually have a much better provenance than we give them credit for because they're drawing on these earlier accounts and they're naming their earlier accounts and sketching coherently. So it's, okay, this book has disappeared. We don't have it anymore. But we've got four people referencing it. We think there actually was a book that talked about these things. And the transmission of

that information might be more legitimate than people have been willing to give it credit. But it's one of those great pieces. You know, it's the kind of thing you look up that book and people are still mad about it. They're still arguing about it because you're dealing here and this was something I had to think about a lot while writing this book. You're going to study Jerusalem. You are getting into these sort of nuts and bolts of belief systems. And there people have a lot at stake.

And when you revise something, it's going to be controversial, sort of no matter what you do. Yeah. So coming back on to the timeline a bit, so Umar is successful. Jerusalem is an Arab and Muslim hands. And then it stays that way. For some centuries, there's sort of intramisman over, from Sunni to Shia and sort of from Arab to Turk and so forth. Characterize this period before we get to the Crusades. What does it like to be in Jerusalem during these centuries? Well, I think it's mostly peaceful, not to the sense that there is violence happening. Every city has strife in it. There's always problems, right? But for the stretch from 638, all the way until the, really the late 11th century, a period of over 300 years, you don't have any major, there's no massacres, there's no major upheavals, no major civil wars or anything like that. You do have an unfortunate event in the 10th century, the burning of an Orthodox patriarch, which seemed to have been over a tax issue more than anything else, not over religion. But essentially, you have people kind of living and working together. together, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. And as you said, Sunni Shia, the dynamic, and, you know, of course, that's another thing that takes time to develop Shiaism and what it is relief to to Orthodox belief in Islam. But in general, you have not a lot of strife going on in the city, not until the year 1009, where you have this, this weird occasion where you have the Caliph of Egypt,

Al-Hakim, the mad caliph, caliph, as they call him, just goes on a terror and destroys the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And, you know, and, you know, and. goes after pretty much everyone. And when I say that, it's, it's literally everyone. It's the Jews. It's the Christians. It's Sunni Muslims. It's also some of his best friends and closest advisors, massacring all these people. But other than that, this kind of strange event that is later, you get this writing off of it in sources like, oh, wow, how could that happen?

We need to fix this as soon as possible. We're glad that guy's gone, right? Until 1077, you don't have any kind of carnage in the city. You just really don't. And even then, when it happens, it's an. act of retribution, one of the local warlords had taken the city and a group of insurgents inside town had kidnapped his family and held them hostage. So he comes back with his army and he puts them to the sword. But again, it's not religion. It's a personal matter. And so what I argue is that

between the 7th and 11th centuries, when you do see violence in the city, it is due to other factors besides religion. They have to do with questions of economics or authority or or vengeful actions, these sorts of things, but not, I'm going to kill you because you believe something different. And that's right up to the beginning of the First Crusade. Well, this is, this is my question here. So, John, what causes the First Crusade? Yeah, I'm going to, I'll pass on that one, I think. Well, my answer to my students is if somebody tells you the one thing that caused the First Crusade, they're wrong. And you can, you can write that person off because it's really a whole host of factors. And there's a whole cottage industry of publishing on what caused the

First Crusade. And the answer is really it's a whole bunch of different things. Fair enough. It's hard to disagree. Of those things, which would you highlight as particularly worthy of our listeners' awareness? I'll be unpopular here with some of my colleagues. I tend to lean towards a bit more towards the traditional explanation, which is that these are wars mounted in what they perceive to be defense of Christian lands. And there's a lot of problems with that statement I just said, and I'll acknowledge all of them. But there was some very important work done a few years ago by Peter Frankopin, where he went into the Greek documents. And he found the Byzantines were just soliciting military assistance at every level, not just from Rome, from the Pope,

not just from the major political leaders out west, but from even the lower ranking magnates, making them promises, appealing for their assistance, we need soldiers to support ourselves against the Turks, right? But I think what happens is you've got a sensibility of we need to defend Christian lands, not defend our fellow Christians necessarily because the Orthodox were seen as these sort of alien strange Christians, right? You know, they have their liturgy in Greek. That's so strange. Why do they do that? They don't give allegiance to the Pope. they even Christians, right? So not necessarily to defend the people, but to, but to look at these lands and say, hey, I think those are Christian lands, or at least they used to be. And it's a,

it's a righteous thing to go and get them back. And then Jerusalem figures very heavily into that equation. And there's a whole argument about when Urban the second launched the first crusade, how much was Jerusalem at the forefront of his thoughts? You know, did he want the Holy City back specifically? Did he just generalize and say, well, we're going on this quest. And by the way, we can get Jerusalem. How much does apocalypticism fit into that? Because we know some of the crusade authors, the chroniclers, were expecting that when the physical Jerusalem is taken, you know, the heavenly Jerusalem will descend and some are willing to go as far as this is, you know, the second coming of Jesus Christ. So I think at the end of the day, I think it's a war.

It's an expeditionary war. Either defend territories you think should be yours or recover them because you think you unfairly lost them, even if you'd lost them hundreds of years ago. And I tend to look at the military lens, but even that is everything I've just said is highly controversial in specialist circles because then you get to the idea of, well, was this an offensive war?

Was this a defensive? Is this a holy war? What kind of holy war? And you go down all of these rabbit holes. But I think the one thing we can stand on is people were asking for assistance. Assistance was provided. And once the expedition sets out,

they head straight for Jerusalem. So whether they figured that out on the way or if they had a grand scheme the whole time to take it back, they're obviously bending their way down there. From the Muslim perspective, they look at it more in grand strategic terms. The earliest Muslim commenter says, this is an assault on Islam. First, the Christians went to Sicily, then they went to Iberia, and now they're coming to the Levant. They're coming at us on all fronts. And I think that perspective merits serious discussion as well.

So there are aspects of all this that, you know, seem deeply familiar, like so much of what we've talked about is familiar, you know, depending on how you want to define a war. People have fought over Jerusalem slash are threatening to fight wars over Jerusalem through to the present day. And then there are aspects of the First Crusade that do seem, at least at first glance, you know, deeply alien. You know, if this is an expeditionary campaign, you know, who is mounting the campaign? You know, like, talk like, like, this is like a social, mass social phenomenon. on some level in addition to being an act of politics, right? Who are the crusaders? What does this army look like?

How does it organize itself? Right, because it's not a regular standing force, right? So it's not like you just take your divisions and, you know, pack them up and send them to, you know, Saudi Arabia to work on Desert Shield, right? Sure. It's generated through a call to arms by a Roman papacy, which at the time had significant power and influence over some secular government. But the preaching is done. It's most famously done in Claremont in 1095 by Urban II. But then the bishops go out to every corner and they preach it to these local communities and you have this great stirring of people from all different quarters. And then they equip themselves and they mortgage their properties for money and then eventually muster at particular locations and then move in different groups sort of towards the Holy Land. So it's not like we would think about in terms of expeditionary, certainly today. But it's,

It is across the water in a sense. It's 3,000 kilometers away. And it's by this loose coalition of Christian, I suppose we could call them Holy Warriors, right? People fighting for God, getting the little cross stitched on the corner of their cloak, going and doing God's work and sort of streaming there from all different directions. And then they coalesce once they get to Constantinople, you see this, because everybody goes to Constantinople first as the first major rally.

point. And there you see much more coherence, but even then you still don't have unity of command. You have several crusade leaders instead of one dominant personality leading the whole effort. So it's certainly not expeditionary like we would think of it today. But I would argue it's the medieval version of, I guess you could almost call it the sort of multinational. They're not heads of state on the first crusade, but they're coming from these different regions, speaking different languages, all united by a common religion and a common, I think you could argue, cultural basis as well. Yeah. And just if you would, tell the story of what happens when this crusader army arrives in Jerusalem. What do they actually achieve? What do they do? Yeah, it takes some time.

They get there and they don't have any supplies and they don't have any wood. So they can't actually mount an effective siege, which I think is great as I tell my students. I mean, we always talk about all these big sieges and you see them in the movies, where'd they get all the wood for those siege towers and battering rams, right? They don't have any. It takes them some time to find some wood and to build towers and rams and these sorts of things. And so it takes about a month of scurrying around to get the right materials.

But eventually they do get into the city. They overtop the wall in the north. And then they come through the Zion gate in the south. And then they stream into the city. And once they get in, if you ever been to the old city of Jerusalem, Jerusalem. It's the only who's been there and knows that it's sort of the tight confines of the streets. And, and, you know, some of them today, you know, will underground and they'll go around these corners just really, really tight. And you get the sense of a defending garrison backing up

through the streets. And it's getting more and more crowded as they clash together and jam up in these big groups. And the Crusaders just come at them slicing and dicing. It's just right at them. These are the remaining defenders of the city. You just entered the city. The bloodlust is running high. Any semblance of command and control is really out the window, even if you wanted to control your troops. I'm not sure how you do. And they push the garrison into the temple mount and basically slaughter them. About 3,000 defenders. And when I say defenders, and we always say 3,000 defenders, 3,000, including the garrison and then women and children and non-combatants, we're all kind of massed together in one. And after this, you have now renewed Christian control

of Jerusalem. What does Christian rule in Jerusalem look like? And then what is the strategic situation of the, I guess it's the crusader kingdom, right? Right. Life is terrible in Jerusalem in the beginning. They throw out and all the remaining Muslims and Jews who weren't killed in the siege are expelled. They're no longer allowed to live there. Some of them are ransomed. Some of they're just thrown out. So it's a Christian only city, but the problem is, is most of the crusading host decides to go home. You've accomplished your objective. Jerusalem's in Christian hands, there will be a kingdom that is founded and the host returned back to Western Europe. So strategically you have this sort of outpost in the Levant, about, think about

3,000 crusaders state. And that's to defend a territory that stretches for over 300 miles north to south, really from, you're talking about from Edessa in the north all the way down to Jerusalem and eventually down to Ascalon by the 1120s. That's not many people. So you're, you're surrounded by hosts of enemies and you don't have the manpower to keep your cities safe. The only thing the Christians have going in sort of in the wind column is that the Muslim world likewise is divided and fractured and unable to mount any kind of united response. If it had been, I don't think the crusaders would have been around very long. They would have been squelched pretty quickly.

But as it is, what happens is the call goes out for military assistance, right? more soldiers to come out to the east and to help defend these outposts. And people start pledging money and material support. You open up the trade routes because the First Crusade managed to acquire some ports along the way. So now you can bring in the ships and establish mercantile contracts with the Italians and those sorts of things. So strategically, it is the fringes of Christendom. And it's a very weak fringe. It's going to collapse unless you continue to buttress it, find ways for it to survive.

And from any of the crusaders, they discover, I think it's to their chagrin because they just hadn't really considered this. It involves making some friends in the region, not just with the Eastern Christians that they think are a little weird, but with Muslim Emirates who, you know, you might not like, but they can provide some kind of military support. You can strike a deal with them. So that ghost town of Jerusalem very quickly, that point out in the book, you know, it goes maybe 20 years, maybe, not even, where Muslims are kept out of the city. eventually they start showing up again because you're going to need allies, you're going to need customers for your shops. You need a market in Jerusalem and you're not going to have that unless you invite the non-Christians back. Yeah. So I'm conscious of our time here. So rather than going sort of crusade by crusade through the rest of your account, I mean, what is to come here

and maybe you would come back and join us one day and would do a dedicated conversation of the crusades? I mean, some of the personalities that people will know are central figures, right, in the and the Crusades to come. Saladin, you know, Richard, Richard the Lionheart, right, all of these figures. What, as you talked sort of in broad terms about the Muslim period that precedes the first crusades, talk, talk about the crusader period. What are the, what are the patterns, what are the major Muslim movements here that people should know about? Right. It's, you're talking about a, there's four the so-called crusader states that are established. It's Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Odessa. And the problem is, is you're surrounded by

millions of Muslims. So as soon as the Arabic forces or the or the Turkish forces or whoever's in the realm get their act together, they're going to be pressured very quickly. And so what happens is you have essentially this just kind of shrinking thing, right? By the 1140s, the county of Odessa has been recaptured by Islamic forces. Antioch is under their constant pressure. Jerusalem gets pressure not only from Syria, from places like Damascus, but also from Egypt, where they managed to hold serve for a while, but guys like Saladin eventually are going to rise up in Egypt and create much more powerful armies to attack the southern flank.

So you've got this shrinking concern that if it's going to survive, it has to be supplied, it has to have sufficient manpower. You have to have the requisite devotion of the participants to stay and to fight. You need groups like the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, right,

to form kind of the backbone, of your army. But the real problem is, because these lands are so separated, no one crusader state really has a sufficient army to defend the whole thing. And so sometimes you may have to send a few thousand soldiers north to help out Antio, right? You might have to send them to the coast. You don't always have them on hand. And if the kingdom's army falls, that's by far the largest army in the region. If the kingdom of Jerusalem army falls, then all of those crusader states are unprotected. None of them can be defended. And that's the, that's what happens in 1787 when Saladin wins his famous victory at the Battle of Hatene. He wipes out the kingdom's

field army. And once he does, everything is for the taking because they simply don't have the combat power to hold them off. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the nice, simpler, I have to say, I learned from your book, and I did not know this. I should have noted it. Like any, you know, any good American of my class and generation, I get all of my information about this period from movies. and an Umberto echo novels. And so I did not know the Knights Templar, and you'll correct me if I get the details wrong here, but the temple in the name comes from the,

from Solomon's temple, which in practice, physically speaking, was the occupied Alexa mosque. Do I have that right? Yes. So they are the knights of the, you know, captured Alexa, which is called,

they call the Temple of Solomon, not exactly accurately, but sort of literally in the neighborhood. And that is the order is dedicated to the protection. of Alexa. I did not, I did not realize that. Yeah, to the protection of their building and then, and then, well, in their founding documents, protecting of the of the pilgrims, right, of the passageways, the roads back and forth throughout the kingdom. But yeah, there's this level of confusion, which is striking where they think the Alaksa mosque is the Temple of Solomon and the Shrine of the

dome of the Rock, which is actually built probably on the site of the Temple of Solomon. They call the Temple of Domene, the Temple of the Lord. Right. And so there's this confusion. He'd say, And that leads into kind of a bigger discussion of how much did the crusaders actually know about Islam? How much do they know about its holy buildings and its belief systems and all of that? And that's a great discussion to have. Clearly, there's some who know it very well. But if you imagine a mass of 10, 20,000 soldiers on the First Crusade and then subsequent armies, they really know very little about it.

They're not reading Arabic. And that's the only way to get the Quran in the period. They don't know the belief systems. all they know are stories about Muhammad and, you know, and certain things. But those technicalities tend to elude them, and it's a little humorous to us today. Yeah, absolutely. John Hosler, author of Jerusalem Falls, Seven Centuries of War and Peace. This has been a fascinating conversation.

It's a fascinating book. I hope you'll come back sometime and we can talk about the crusade more broadly. I'd love to. My pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.