TRIGGERnometry - The Truth about the Crusades - Dan Jones

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Dan Jones is a historian, writer, presenter and podcaster. Watch his show "CASTLES" on Netflix and check out his latest book "HENRY V". Follow Dan on X: https://x.com/dgjones SPONSOR. We’re honoured to partner with Hillsdale College. Go to https://hillsdale.edu/trigger to enroll for free. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crusading changes across time. It's not just a fixed civilizational war between X religion and Y religion. At every point, this ought to have failed, but it doesn't. And so it looks a lot like a miracle. Somehow we've got from, hey, let's have this movement where you go and attack enemies of Christ to, yay, let's go and destroy the biggest city in Christendom. There's poetic justice in the fact that eventually this thing just like ends up in Christian or Christian violence. This isn't a very triumphalist heroic story, is it, Dan?

Did I say it was? Dan Jones, welcome to Trignometry. Thanks for having me. You are obviously incredibly famous and successful historian, and we wanted to bring you on to talk about one of the things you're an absolute expert, which is a crusades. However, while we were sitting here, the cameras weren't rolling, who were just having a drink and making small talk,

we actually discovered that you have some very interesting thoughts about the modern world, which will... So we'll park at Crusades for one second, if we even ever get to them, frankly. And what we were talking about was a mutual friend of us who's lived a long life. And we were talking about the fact that in that time, you said a revolution that happened, which is akin most of all throughout history to the Reformation. What are you talking about?

Well, what I meant was that I, the context was that I believe we lived through a revolution that will end up looking as significant in terms of human development as the industrial, certainly the industrial revolution, maybe more significant than the industrial revolution and possibly even the agricultural revolution. The first part of it, or the most obvious part of it that's really affecting the way the world operates today in lots of ways politically, militarily, culturally and so on,

is a communications revolution. And when I think about communications, revolutions driving big periods of social and political, geopolitical, and geopolitical, and geostrategic change, I always think about the elemental story of the reformation, right? It begins with the printing press. You know, there can be no reformation without a printing press. The printing press enables a number of different things to happen. On the one hand, the mechanics of the beginning of the reformation are the Catholic Church, in the 15th century starts printing indulgences,

so mass-producing chits to get you through heaven for sale in an obviously corrupt way. It would be impossible without the printing press. And the second thing that happens with the printing press in the 1450s onwards is it just becomes, you know, there's an exponential increase in the amount of stuff you can publish, the access to publishing, the speed with which ideas spread,

the speed with which people, Martin Luther being the most obvious, can become famous, can become what we now think of as thought leaders. And that, now, obviously, it's on a different scale to what we're experiencing the modern world, but the sort of principles are basically the same. And people start piling in with all sorts of radical opinions that start to drive to like the basic building blocks of how society, certainly in the West, operates. And that, you know, over the course of a couple of thought generations, ends up with the world really polarising, first culturally and then politically. And I think that, you know, we've seen something analogous. History never repeats itself. But it does work in analogy.

And I think we've seen something analogous in our own lifetimes. It's not the only feature of what we're seeing going on at the moment. But that was sort of what I was getting at. And then the context of what we were, of our conversation, which you referenced, we were talking about a mutual friend of ours, was that the way that people, the traditions, modes of debate, discussion, like intellectual engagement and intercourse have changed over our life. We're about the same age, over our lifetimes as well.

So I find that sort of thing fascinating. And in some ways, for me, that's like, the point of studying history is not to find modern parallels and to say, hey, X thing is just a version of Y thing. But that's one of the fringe benefits of studying history or one of the things that I think is. Well, you say that, not that I'd wish to disagree with someone as a professional historian,

but I think one of the things that comes out of learning history is understanding the part of human history. nature that is recurring. And human beings will often respond to similar stimuli in similar ways because human beings remain fairly consistent over time, I would argue, even though morals and whatever changes. But what's interesting, so what you're really saying is, in the 15th century, what you have is a set of what we might call, I'm translating this into sufficiently abstract language so that it can be applied to the monworld. You have a set of increasingly corrupt institutions that are being perceived as corrupt, the ones that are in charge

of things. Then you have a change in the communication, which means more people have access, A, to information, but B also to the disseminate, they're more able to disseminate information. And that creates an environment in which the orthodoxies that have existed and been held in place up until this moment are destroyed, or at least challenged very powerfully. And there is a fragmentation of reality in that more people now believe more different things in the same space. And from that, if I'm not mistaken, follows two centuries of religious war. So the obvious questions it is for us is where are we headed? That's the one question that you should never ask a historian because they're completely

unqualified to tell you. But the analysis, I think we're broadly saying the same thing. I think you're slightly dog whistling a little bit more than I am to like current trends, but that's fine because that's, you know, what that's the job. But I think, yeah, like, I brought this up and I think that there are obvious parallels between what happens in a society when you introduce a brand new way of communicating. And it's, it is interesting if one has looked at the 15th century, then to look at what's going on now with, on a far greater and faster scale. I mean, Gutenberg's press and the iPhone in your pocket are not the same. same thing. And there are, and this is the big point of doing history, is not just to look at similarities, it's to look at differences. There are wild differences in what we're talking about.

But what are they? Well, there's a big difference between the printing press and the volume of material that can be published and the nature of social media. And there is a big difference between the scale of globalisation in the world and the amount of the sort of range of interest that apply in our case

versus in the 15th century and there's a fundamental difference to living in a nuclear weaponised a million different differences but the sort of the elemental bits of a communication of revolution, a new reformation is something that I'm kind of interested in, for sure.

And the thing that I find interesting is that the words that we use nowadays, they're not the same as the words we used back then. So, for instance, the word crusade, it seems like everything now is a crusade. We're going to have a crusade against sugar. We're going to have a crusade against this, a crusade against that. But when you look back at the original meaning of the word crusade, it's very different. Yes. So what I want to talk about is what was the original meaning of the word crusade?

Right. And what were the purposes of it? And why did they happen? Well, there's two parts to what you just said. The first is to do with the way that language and the English language moves and evolves at the moment and the speed with which words are detached from their original meaning or, you know, as analogy and then the analogy becomes the sort of fixed meaning within the word. And there is also a kind of a current obsession with renaming familiar things and giving them new terms.

So this, for example, is a podcast, but in about 20 years ago, you might have called it a television show because it's being filmed and it's just some people discussing. Right, okay, but put that aside, let's go into the Middle Ages and talk about the idea of what the Crusade meant. And when I wrote my book on the Crusades, I called it Crusaders. And I called it Crusaders for a good reason, because it's much easier to understand what the Crusades meant and were in the Middle Ages from the 11th century, certainly through the 15th, even into the 16th century, if you think in terms of crusaders, rather than crusades themselves. When we teach the Crusades in schools, in universities, we typically think about this.

numbered crusades. The first crusade was, you know, the big land armies went to Jerusalem to liberate it from the, you know, the forces of Islam, second crusade to, you know, to revenge the fall of Odessa, third crusade to revenge the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, and so on and so on, until we lose count after about nine crusades. No one at the time was going, well, the fifth crusades kicking off, I'll get on board with that, because I missed the fourth. These are historians' terms. To be a crusader was something real in the middle. ages because it meant that you'd taken the cross, you were signed with the cross, you'd been through a formal ceremony in which you'd made effectively a contract with the church

and in a sense with the Almighty. And that contract was that you were going, you had promised formally in front of other people to go and fight the enemies of Christ as determined ultimately by papacy, all under secular pressure from kings and such. you had taken the mark of the cross, usually a strip of cloth in the shape of the cross, sewn to your clothes, which is a public sign that you were going to do this. And in return, you'd been offered some benefits, some sort of worldly, let's say, your property was under the protection of the papacy for the duration of your crusade. And most importantly, you had bargained for the remission of your sins.

By going on crusade, by going to fight the enemies of Christ, as crusades evolve, can be in a number of different places, you are buying remission of sins and therefore you are buying a shortcut through purgatory. It's like having the sort of fast track at the airport through security, you know, you're not going to have to live through that waking hell of curing with everybody else. your path to heaven after you die is going to be shorter. It's a form of penance. So to make that oath is to distinguish yourself from other people. And we should think about crusaders rather than crusades, if we want to get a handle on what this thing really is, I believe. And because people think it was motivated purely by religion,

But like you said yourself, there was also other factors at play here. You know, there was a chance to make a name for yourself. It was a chance for a young man to make his way in the world to find some sense of purpose, money. So I think one of the things that I wanted to talk about is the way that we look at it through a 21st century lens is actually a little bit of a distortion, isn't it, from the medieval reality? Yeah, and there's another distortion which you've introduced in the question, which is to view all. all crusades are the same, because the crusading movement changes radically from its inception. I would argue in the 1060s rather than 1090s, which is when the first crusade happens, the 1060s in the Iberian Peninsula is when lots of ideas that sort of froth around,

bubble around in the soup of crusading that start to emerge. It's radically different by the time you get to, let's say, even the 14th century, things have changed. Even the 13th century has become very different. So, crusading changes across time. It's not a fixed thing. It's not just a fixed civilizational war between X religion and Y religion. That's a component of crusading. And probably in the academic debates over crusading,

which have gone on in the last 20 years or so, there's been a drive to push out all idea that this is even, there's even an element of contest between Islam and Christianity within crusading, which is preposterous. But it is not the only element of crusading. There are lots of political factors, regional factors, geographical factors,

and there are lots of factors that are purely individual, which is to go back to this idea of the crusader. You know, why I might choose to go on crusade might be different from where you might choose to grow on crusade, and where I might choose to go on crusade, and where you choose, and so on and when and so on and so forth. It's a very complex idea. And to return, you know, to close the loop slightly on your first question,

that's why the sort of the use of a crusade against litter or a crusade against, you know, whatever, diesel cars or whatever, is not a very helpful idiom in English because it just suggests that a crusade only means a sort of a passionate, zealous struggle in the name of a single cause. That's actually, that's quite a distortion of what crusading in the Middle Ages actually is. Well, I'm really keen to hear you break down how those movements evolved over those three centuries or so. But before you do, the one thing that I'm often, I often think about when we think about anything

historic is just a failure of us in the modern world to appreciate that while religion would not have been the sole factor, was driving these people. Nonetheless, they clearly existed in a moral and ethical and religious universe that is completely different from our own in the sense that there are very few people in the modern world. There are some, but very few who would go and fight and die for religious cause. I don't imagine there's many people in this country who would now go to a foreign country because it would give them a faster route to heaven. There's not many people left like that in the modern world. So what is the... Where do you mean? What do you mean what I mean? Where are you talking about? In the West? In the Christian world. Yeah. All you have to go to is the Eastern Mediterranean.

Oh, oh. I was being diplomatic. This is what I was saying. There's not many people left. There are, of course, so the people who want to wage jihad, they're a pretty, pretty strong presence. But in the Christian world, in the world in which we live, this sense that you're going to fire and die for your God or for the opportunity to get into heaven or the opportunity to have you. your sins forgiven. That seems preposterous to most people in the UK right now, I would say, right? So what was the world that they were living in when it came to religion? Well, again, two parts to the question.

Yes, in the West today, and this is the story of maybe just 50, 60, 70 years, the rapid secularization of most Western societies, with exceptions. has meant that it's now very difficult for us in 2024, 5, whatever, to look back on the world of the Middle Ages and really understand the mind world, that for the most part, the mind world of England, of France and the Middle Ages, would be to live in a theocracy closest in character to modern Saudi Arabia in terms of the presence of religion in everyday life and in politics and in the visibility of it.

That's the norm that you've got to kind of try and factor your way into when you think about the Middle Ages. I think the second assumption that's baked into your question is that people today would, would find it preposterous to go and fight and die for a religious cause, but they might not find it preposterous to go and fight and die for another cause. And I think that in that you're underestimating just how unwilling people are to fight and die for pretty much anything at the moment.

You know, if we go back to the beginning of the 20th century with the mass mobilisation of European countries for the First World War and indeed the Second World War later on, the idea that there would be enthusiastic droves of ordinary people signing up to go and fight and die or their country would now be a hard sell in most Western European countries. Probably less so in the United States

because of the relative size of the military and the presence of the military in American society. But certainly in Western European states, is ideally, what would you go and fight and die for? Would you go and fight and die for? Like, as a basic assumption, like tomorrow, you know, you're leaving the kids, you're leaving the wife, hop on the train, wave your hats out, see you in six months,

knowing that there's the possibility you can go off. I think, I think, you know, one of the effects of having lived through a historically almost unprecedented and extremely blissful period, relatively blissful period of peace and prosperity in the West, is that we have forgotten how anomalous we are in history and how unlike most other generations in history we are, where there were a number of causes which were so sort of baked into character, mind, world, culture, society, that it was assumed that if these were challenged,

we would, you know, everybody would have a duty to, and would feel the responsibility to rise up and fight for them. I've only got to the assumptions of your question. Now, I forgot what the actual question was. Well, actually, where I was going with it is coming back to the point you made to Francis, which is it wasn't one thing.

it evolved over time. The Crusaders were different people in the 13th century. Absolutely. So give us that. The first one starts. Is that a purely religious war at that time? Is that, you know, the Crusaders going to liberate Jerusalem?

That's why they're there. Or is there even more complexity to even the first one? You're going to get a historian's answer, which is it's much more complex and we have to go back. We did ask. Yeah. At trigonometry, we value intellectual curiosity. and the lessons of history.

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It's completely free and a fantastic way to draw inspiration from one of history's greatest defenders of freedom. Head to Hillsdale.edu slash trigger now and start learning today. Okay, 1090s, as is one known, 1095, Pope Urban II, preaches the first crusade, 1096, 7, 8, 9, they set off, travel overland to Jerusalem, 15th of July, 1099, liberate Jerusalem, seized Jerusalem, great massacres in Jerusalem, set up the Crusader states of Kingdom of Jerusalem,

County of Medea, principality of Antioch, county of Tripoli. Okay. Just to interject very briefly, sorry, before you do, the narrative is this city is a Christian city which must be freed from the Muslims who have occupied. Is that broadly the narrative? The Christ's sepulchre is there.

We're going to come to this. Okay, cool. In order to understand what happens in the 50... Sorry, in order to understand what happens in the 1090s, I believe you've got to go back slightly a generation to the 10th century. 60s. And you've got to go to the other end of Europe, which is Spain, as we now call it, Spain and Portugal, the Iberian Peninsula. At that point, for hundreds of years, there had coexisted,

sometimes happily and sometimes unhappily, a number of different states within the Iberian peninsula, some of which were ruled by Muslims, and some of which were ruled by Christians. Broadly speaking, it's Christians in the north, Muslims in the south. And there's been tension in and among, in between all of these different states, Christian, non-Christian, Muslim, Muslim, Muslim, you know, it's a messy place. But during the 1060s, some of the features that we will later come to understand as belonging to crusading, start to emerge in these sort of overlapping conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula. There is the idea that there is a spiritual benefits to be gained and granted by the church to combatants in that war that you can come from outside the region, fight in that war and earn some sort of spiritual benefit.

There is the idea that the war is not just a sort of political, territorial, economic war, that it has some kind of religious flavor that is germane to, whether you're on the Christian side or the Muslim side. And there's also relationships are built up between the secular rulers of the Christian states in particular and a form of Christian monasticism, we call Cluney-Hak monasticism. So Reformed Benedictine monasticism based at Cluny. Cluny is the sort of the grand,

mothership of a reformed type of monasism. And its importance for the story of the Crusades is that it produces Urban II. He comes out of an intellectual world in which there's been a close relationship between his part of the church. Secular rulers fighting wars against Muslims. These wars in northern, well, in the Iberian Peninsula have had a dimension that is to do with competence receiving spiritual benefits. and the church has backed Christian rulers in that fight. We come then to the 1090s,

and the story is complex, but to cut it down to its bones, there's an appeal made by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, eastern capital of the old capital of Eastern Roman Empire, still thought of as the Roman Empire, Christian Empire. And the Emperor, Alexios II Comnenos, writes to the Pope and says, I'm under constant attack Eastern Frontiers

by the forces of Islam, Turkic, Seljuk Turks, among others. I would welcome your assistance in coming and helping me out with that. Urban the second, who's Pope at the time, has a number of problems on his own doorstep, which are to do with trying to revive, you boil them down, trying to revive the power of the papacy and bolster the power of the papacy and the political and cultural influence of the papacy. And these sort of mashing together of ideas, comes to the grand idea that Urban has,

which is to preach a crusade, which to say to the faithful Christians of the Western European kingdoms, particularly France, let's all go and help our Christian brother, the Byzantine emperor, roll back his enemies in our brother kingdom, and we will then go on to take back.

the city of Jerusalem, you know, from Christ's enemies, because the city of Jerusalem is where Christ's ministry and passion occurred. It's where his tomb is in the Church of the Holy Sepulch, and it is a righteous thing to do for us to go and make sure that's back in Christian hands. And the sermon he preachers at Claremont and the subsequent effort of preachers going around, taking this message or, you know, to the ordinary people of Europe, really fires people's imaginations. And so it transpires that 1096, 7, you start to see these big armies coming out of Western Europe composed of some professional warriors, but a lot of just sort of hangers on. who want to claim this spiritual benefit, who want to have remission of sins,

and who are prepared to leave their homes and travel thousands of miles away in pursuit of that. One of these historical phenomena that when, you know, you can explain it, element by element, strand by strand, show the complexity of it. But sometimes when you, also when you stand back from it, you go, and I will channel Joe Rogan here, that's wild. That's wild. It is wild. And as a historian, I think sometimes you have to recognize that.

Sometimes you are like instinct as historians is to rationalize everything away. And then often it's worth saying, you know what, this was like a fucking weird time. And had the First Crusade failed, which by rights it should have done at a number of turns, that I think would have been the last of it. But it doesn't fail. They keep on succeeding. They make their way, these armies, all the way across Europe, various routes, but largely down the Danube, across the Balkans, to Constantinople.

And then they move on, march all the way through, to use the old-fashioned term, Asia Minor, mostly modern Turkey, down to the Umanus Mountains, down through Syria, city after city. They're not defeated. And they find their way all the way to Deroon. The siege Jerusalem and in July 1099, Jerusalem falls. I mean, at every point, this is at every point this ought to have failed, but it doesn't. And so it looks a lot like a miracle. Looks a lot like a miracle.

And from that point on, you know, I think there's a strong argument to see 1099 as a real pivotal point in the Middle Ages. people often say what's the most important event they don't often say this sometimes people say what's the most important event or like world-changing event of the Middle Ages and most people's pick would be 1348 Black Death Global pandemic kills 50-60% of people in Europe. There's a very strong argument

that up there with the Black Death is 1099 full of Jerusalem because it just sets the framework for the political and military imaginations of generation after generation after generation of people in the West thereafter. And arguably even today, you know, this fact of having crusades built into our language as a sort of, you know,

a lazy idiom, something we all think we understand, this idea that it's, you know, crusading is still layered onto cultural and political and geopolitical conversations. It's all the legacy of 1099. But the interesting thing about that crusade is that it could appear, from the outside eye to be a miracle. What is also interesting is that it's almost, it might have actually been better if it hadn't ever succeeded. That's what some historians think for the instabilities that it caused and for the Second Crusade and so on and so forth. So why then did the

Second Crusade happen? Because if we took, or if the Crusaders took Jerusalem, then that's a happy ending, it? As I say that and he raises his eyebrow in disbelief. My eyebrows, they'll have a will of their own. Well, it's not just the city of Jerusalem, right? I mean, what's set up after the First Crusade is four fragile states built on a sort of, quote-unquote, Western feudal model. Kingdom of Jerusalem, the county of Tripoli, the principality of Antioch, and the county of Bedsa. Those sit on top of what is mostly now Israel, Lebanon, Syria. Maybe these terms will have

changed by the time that our viewers watch this. It is a region of perpetual instability. Those very fragile states, with Jerusalem the city at their heart, once set up, must be defended. And that then is a constant factor in the thinking of politicians at the other end of the Mediterranean, that it is a high duty to help sustain the crusade estates. The rough modern analogy is this is what we've seen from the 20th century into the 21st century. is the belief, in my opinion, the correct belief that the states of the West and the United States, but the Western European states as well,

have a sort of moral duty to uphold and back the existence of Israel in that exact same region. I'm not trying to open that discussion now, but I'm saying that if you want a kind of mental analogy, there's something there. So from the 1090s onwards, there is an awareness in the, let's call it the West, that these Crusader states cannot exist without Western support. And there is therefore a moral and political imperative to support them.

Now, that belief does wax and wane over time. And then as now, there is a sort of a kind of desire among Western politicians, kings and princes, to just wish that they could just sort of survive with the minimum possible assistance. And generally they're only spurred into action by a disaster. So to turn to the second crusade, what happens in the 1140s is the county of Odessa is basically overrun

by a guy called Zengi. After whom, in fact, one of the... So as we're talking today, Syria has just been overrun and Bashar al-Assad has been kicked out of Syria. and one of the elements within the new Syrian regime, named themselves after Zengi. Anyway, just as an aside.

Zengi, a very brutal warlord, overruns County of Odessa, and there's a realisation in the West that really something has to be done, otherwise the more trouble lies ahead. So in the 1140s, what you see is another, the crusade deliberately modelled on the first. It's cosplay in a sense.

It's like we're going to take the same route. We're going to do the same things. Things are obviously going wrong because, you know, we're very sinful. God wants to, you know, wants us to prove ourselves righteous and to atone for our sins. So we're going to go and do the first crusade again and we're going to get Adessa back. But there's a whole lot of heel dragging because by the time the second crusade comes around, It's no longer being run by nobles or led by nobles. Churchmen is being led by kings.

And, of course, the higher up the political ladder you go, the more diplomacy and bureaucracy you tend to find. And ego. And ego. Well, you can find ego at any level of society, I believe. But the second crusade, but it sounds like the seeds of its own destruction laying in the first crusade, because if the crusade, the first crusade,

basically succeeded by fluke. And then... Well, you did a healthy measure of luck, yeah, but not totally by... Well, yeah, look, if your premise is if the First Crusade fails, there isn't a second. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

I think if the First Crusade fails, nobody's sitting around going, well, what have another 30,000 of us all walked over the land to Jerusalem and try it again? Nah, it's for the birds. My point I think I made already is, like, once the First Crusade

has... succeeded and these crusade estates exist. Yes, there is now a moral and political imperative to defend what's been won. So in the Second Crusade, the county of Odessa has been overrun by this brutal warlord. What happens from there? Well, the Second Crusade is by and large a failure in Edessa has never won back. There's a short story. Louis the 7th, King of France, most prominent leader of the Crusade, goes along with his wife, famous wife Eleanor of Aquas. who will later marry the English King Henry II be the sort of matriarch of the Plantagenet dynasty.

They take a long time getting there. Louis is almost captured, killed on the way. They run out of money. There's all sorts of scandal that Eleanor of Aquitaine is, so it said, conducting an affair with her uncle, Raymond Count of Tripoli when she gets that, and that's true. But that's what sort of the scandal, the sort of skank merchants put around.

Nothing is really done. They waste a lot of money in time and all go home with a tale between their legs. Second Crusade is a disaster. There's one very important element, however, to the Second Crusade, which is much more important than what happens out in the East. And that is that during the sort of lead-up to the Second Crusade, a bunch of...

A bunch of German knights decide that really Jerusalem is very far away. And couldn't they do something a bit closer to... Isn't there a sort of working from home protocol? So they managed to get the Pope to agree that since on the sort of board, you know, since Charlemagne's time, on the fringes of what we now call Germany, roughly, there are lots of non-Christian people. There are pagans, Baltic, pagans, Prussia, so on.

Well, since they're not Christian, aren't they the enemies of course? Christ, you know, and since we want their kind of lands and resources, can't they be categorized as worthy people to crusade against? And they managed to bend the Pope's arm until this is yes. Very, very important. Because now, the notion of where you can go on crusade has expanded slightly. So we expanded slightly so that the main focus of crusading on a sort of high political level is still, these crusade estates in the east, Spain's still going on, we can still sort of have that kind of theatre.

Now there's a third theatre and that's the Baltic. Well, now there's a third theatre. There can easily be a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. It's like once you make alien, what was it called, Prometheus or resurrection or whatever, whereas now the franchise can expand, unbelief, you know, So now there's loads more places. There's a sort of principle is established.

It doesn't go very far in the 12th century, but it's established that crusading can happen. Crusading isn't Jerusalem. Crusading is enemies of Christ. That becomes very important over the history of crusader. So that's what happens with the second one. They go back with the tail between the legs. How do we get to the next one?

What happens in the intermediate period? Well, we've been looking at things from the Christian perspective hitherto. Islamic chroniclers, students of what's gone on in this crusade that seems so important to the West, when they sort of deign to notice it, the crux in the greater world of Islam, this is really not that big of a deal. It's kind of annoying. they argue that the reason Jerusalem fell, the reason Jerusalem falls in 1099 is because the forces of Islam are at odds with each other.

And very broadly speaking, this means there's a big sectarian division, then as now, the forces of Sunni and Shia in broadly speaking the Middle East. Now it's, again, very broad strokes. Iran and Saudi Arabia, Shia and Sunni. Then it's effectively Syria, Sunni, and Egypt, Fatimid Shiite.

And because they've been loggerheads, the argument goes, this is why we were weak and the Christians found their way in. Now what happens between the second and third crusade is that after Zenghi, it's a guy called Nur al-Din, and after Nur al-Din there's a guy called Saladin, probably the most famous name, a Kurdish general who rises up, very short story, very long story short, to take control as sultan of a combined, now Sunni-led Syria and Egypt. That means that the Crusader states, which have hitherto been able to play off Syria versus Egypt effectively, are now surrounded. And it's been said for a very long time that when this happens, bad things will ensue. And

bad things do ensue from a Christian point of view. The bad thing that ensues is that on the 4th of July 1187 Saladin leads a gigantic army into battle against a very big Christian army led by King Guy, the first king of Jerusalem, near the twin horns of nesting volcano at Hattin. The Battle of Hattin, 4th of July 1187, sees the Christians absolutely wiped out. Wiped out. King Guy is captured. the most holy relic in Christendom, the big chunk of the true cross, it's supposed to be the last major remaining fragment of the cross on which Christ was crucified, is seized, never to be seen again, as it turns out. A lot of the sort of crack troops of the Crusader World Army,

the Templars and Hospitlers, are taken prisoner and are killed, were executed by Saladin, and then in October. October 1187, Jerusalem itself is surrounded and falls without much of a fight and without much of a massacre, which is to Saladin's credit. And there's a big contrast which is drawn at the time between Saladin's capture of Jerusalem and the First Crusader's capture of Jerusalem, which is violently bloody. Jerusalem falls. And this is not, this is like, okay, Odessa was bad, but wow, this is, this is existential.

Shockwaves across Christendom. And from a position of kind of, oh God, it's really annoying to have to prop up these crusader states, there's a total reversal of political opinion, which is it's our absolute bounden duty to save these crusader states and to take Jerusalem back. and the third crusade, probably the best known after the first crusade, maybe even the best known full stop, is led by Philip V. II, Philip Augustus of France, great kings of medieval France, Richard I, Richard the first, Richard the Lionheart, king of England, not one of the great kings of England

of the Middle Ages, but certainly, you know, one of the most famous kind of international statesmen of the Middle Ages. and various others, and they take their armies, not overland, they choose new routes. And Richard, for example, goes by sea, by Sicily and Cyprus. And they pitch up in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin by now has Aca or Aker up on the northern Israeli border with Lebanon today. He's taken Eka and is now besieged. So Richard and Philip Augustus turn up and join in the siege of Aege.

they take it back and then they fall out and Philip goes home Richard leads a march of his army all the way down the coast with the aim of turning inland when he gets to Jaffa now part of Tel Aviv over the Judean hills to Jerusalem

he's going to liberate Jerusalem and he never quite gets there falls just short twice but he goes home having shored up a reduced but still viable kingdom of Jerusalem. And the Third Crusade, it gets almost to Jerusalem, but they go home with a sense of unfinished business and then it all fall out when they go home to the West. It's interesting that you said that about Richard I, because he's one of our most famous ever kings in this country. Rightly so. And you say rightly so. Why do you say that? Well, he's very famous because he's, you know, he was a great crusading hero for those who celebrate.

And, I mean, one of the most famous men in the world of his time. I said he wasn't a great English king. And I meant that because he's basically an absentee. He basically guts England's finances twice, wants to pay for the crusade and wants to pay for his ransom because he gets captured on the way back. I'm talking about England, not the broader Plantagenet Empire. He's an amazing warrior. I mean, the greatest general of his day, and he dunks repeatedly on the head of Philip Augustus,

one of the greatest kings of France for the whole Middle Ages. I mean, while Richard I first is alive, Philip Augustus is a chump, again and again and again and again. And as soon as Richard's dead, wow, he just flourishes into the greatest statesman in the West. That's a measure of how, how intimidating a politician general Richard was, how resilient he was.

But if you were, you know, for England itself, I mean, he drains it of money, neglect its government, and leaves his brother John, not a great guy, but nevertheless, leaves him with problems which fester until you have Magna Carta. So, I mean, Richard, that's what I meant by not a great

English king. Not a sort of, if we're in the realm of medieval English kings. Not a Henry the 5th, who's a great general, but also has, you know, understands how to rule a country. Not a Henry II, Richard's father, not an Edward III, you know, and so on and so on. How was he perceived at the time in England? Was he seen as this great warrior king that everybody respected and adored and admired? Or was there resentment when people were looking around and seeing resources being drained, the country being poorer? It's difficult to pass, really, because the great issue of the day is the crusade,

and there's a great popular enthusiasm for the crusade. There's also a sense that you get from Chronicles of the time where you have these... It's noted that Richard says things like, I would have sold London if I could find a buyer, As soon as he becomes king, he just says this whole process of what you could call corruptly selling off offices in order to raise money for the crusade. But it's very hard to disentangle that from the crusade is the most important thing in everybody's mind. He, you know, his reputation is for being what he is.

He's like, you know, there's debates that are, let's take an example from a different period of history. The debates that are currently so fashionable about Churchill at the moment. seek to analyze Churchill almost as if he wasn't a great war leader, as if there were other judgments that could be made in isolation about Winston Churchill, putting aside for a moment the fact that he was one of the three great leaders of the Second World War in facing down Adolf Hitler. But put that aside for a moment. Let's talk about his, you know, a few lines from his writing when he was young.

It seems to say, come on, that's preposterous. And I think something similar. It's hard to... It would have been a very difficult question for anyone to answer at the time. What do you think of Richard as a leader put aside the crusade? He's a great crusading king.

He's a great crusade of king. So the third crusade sort of doesn't, at least, doesn't succeed. Is that fair to say? At the very least. So it's original metric for success is get back Jerusalem. On that metric it fails.

But if the second metric for success is make sure the whole thing doesn't fall into the sea and there's nothing left, it succeeds. They take Acre back, acre, which becomes then the capital of the kingdom, the effective capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem, an incredibly important mercantile state in which, you know, the powerhouse merchant states of Europe, but mostly Italian. in seafaring cities, Pisa, Genoa, and so have their own quarters, Venice, have their own quarters. It's smaller. It's a sort of coastal literal now with a series of trading, coastal trading cities, big castles manned by the Templars and Hospitlers, but it's viable now and remains

viable and it's shored up. So from that point of view, does Richard, does the Third Crusade, no, it doesn't take back Jerusalem. So on that metric, it's failed, but it does keep things propped up for a bit. And it instills some sense of pride as well. Right. Which is important. Very important. Yeah. So there isn't the sense of like we tried and failed. The sense is we had a good go and we got some decent results. Is that broadly where we are? It's, you know, we don't have newspaper columnists particularly. I mean, I mean, there are,

yes, I think people well, what I'm getting at is it's not an overwhelming catastrophic failure and therefore everyone goes, okay, you know, this is over. Oh no, but no, right. It's a partial success that leaves unfinished business.

And is that how we get to the Fourth Crusade? Right. Tell us about that. I hear the news gets bad. The Fourth Crusade is pretty weird. And not in a good way. So the Fourth Crusade, yes, springs out of the sense of unfinished business from the third. That, damn, we nearly got there. Okay, let's have another go.

No kings involved now. I think that the experience of the Third Crusade had rather turned kings off of leading these sort of things. But you have effectively a bunch of hopped up French knights at some tournaments who decide, yo, we're going to go do this properly. And so they... Six spears in. Right.

They get... They team up with the Venetians. Like, okay, we're going to go to it properly. We're going to need some ships. Who makes ships? Venetians make ships. They make a pact with the devil, effectively. And they get the city of Venice...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we can't skip over that. What's wrong with Venetians? Yeah. That's wrong with the Venetians, but, I mean, they're tough businessmen. They make a pact with the Venetians. that the Venetians are going to build on the ships to take one crusade. The whole of Venice is going to turn its hand to shipbuilding for a year, and then they're going to go off on crusade.

And if all the French knights have to do is raise the troops to be on those ships. This proves easier said than done. The shipbuilding gets done by the Venetians, less so the troop raising. And so when it comes time to depart, the Venetians are, and again, I'm simplifying. Well, it's our crusade now. And here we have, if you recall when I was talking about the second crusade, the idea that's emerged in the 1140s,

that the enemies of crusade need not necessarily reside in or around Jerusalem. This is when it's like, it most obviously comes into play. Things go pretty haywire once the Venetians take over the, what we call the fourth crusade. They basically take this crusading fleet to every city they've got beef with. Starting on the coast of modern Croatia, cities who have defied them, people who've pissed them off.

Christians, sail up, attack these cities. The inhabitants of the cities hang, like crosses over the city walls. What are you doing? Never mind that. They sort of attack and burn their enemies. And the French warriors are happy to do this because they just want to brawl, basically. is that? The French warriors are no longer in charge. In charge is a guy called Enrique Dandolo,

who is a blind 80-year-old Venetian dutch. But why are the French, wait, wait, wait, sorry, I don't get this. If I'm a French knight... No, it's not hard, it's not easy to get. If I'm a French knight, and I've said, I want to go on a crusade, you build us some ships, I'm going to raise the troops, and then they sail me to a Christian city in modern-day Croatian. I'll have a go at them. Why would I... Why would I do that? Because you're friends. Some of them go home. Okay.

So, for example, Simon Demolfe. Is that what you're saying? Twat. For some of us, I see the Hundred Years' War is not. They're not in charge anymore. Sorry, mate. This is our crusade now. You know, they've been like...

What do you call it? What do you call it when you think there's a cuckoo in the nest? Right. So the ones that don't want to get stuck in to their fellow Christians, they go home. And the rest of them, sacks. city after city on the way. None of them are Venetians, right. So, and so culminating in Venice's, well, they go to Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the

Mediterranean. And they get themselves involved in a power struggle in Constantinople, which ends with, and this is a very long story short, which ends with, which ends with the Venetian fleet sacking and burning Constantinople. And stealing from Constantinople things that you can still see in Venice today. For example, if you go to St. Marks, in St. Marks? Yes. So you see on the outside of St. Marks, those four beautiful horses. Well, they're replicas inside the real horses,

were stolen from Constantinople in 1204. The excuse might be that, yes, they're Christians, but they're the wrong sort of Christians. Because they're Orthodox? No offense, but yeah. Like, yeah. Like these are the wrong, they're Greeks. They're, yeah. We're going to, and they depose the Greek emperor of Constantinople.

We'll install a Latin emperor, Latin patriarch, and consens. I mean, somehow we've got from, hey, let's have this movement where you go and attack the enemies of Christ and earn spiritual privileges, remission of sins, to, yay, let's go and destroy the biggest city in Christendom. Now, you could also say, yes, but the whole story of crusading is a story of, like, absurd and actually quite offensive, like theological gymnastics. How could we possibly even have the idea of crusading? How could it be that Jesus Christ, if we can remember anything from the ministry and teaching of Jesus Christ, it tended to be things like, turn the other cheek?

How could we go from that to what Christ wants you to do more than anything else is go and attack and kill other human beings? Well, that's what they managed to do. That's baked into the theological kind of DNA of crusading. So it's already like a mad paradox. So maybe it's not that bizarre and maybe it's even sort of ironic or even the poetic, there's poetic justice in the fact that eventually this thing just like ends up in Christian on Christian violence. And this, by the way, is in the end, because at least in the fourth crusade, it's like Latins versus Greeks. It's bits of the Christian world who've been at odds for, well, by now, several hundred years.

It's going to get worse. Spoiler alert. So how much of this was just simply a power grab by the Venetians going, you know what? We want this, we want this, we want this. We've got this crusade. We're going to take it. Because we can, because we're that rich and we're that powerful. And we want to consolidate our wealth and power at the expense of these other cities.

You know when you hear about, you're old enough to remember, Iraq War, Yeah. Gulf War II. Yes. The best sequel, yes. Yes, like aliens or Godfather, Part 2. People would go, it's all about the oil, man. It's all about the oil.

And you know, you might, if you were a neocon at that time, you know, this is spreading democracy. And then, like, you look back and go, fuck, it was all about the oil. Yeah. Okay, the fourth crusade is that. Like, you can sort of construct the argument of these crusades, you know, there was a sort of, it was about Jerusalem, it was going to be this, it was going to be that. And the Venetians just took this over and went hog wild.

This is that kind of, like, it's that cynical, in my opinion. So we have now, the, the moral of the story is never trust an Italian, but. Or the French. I mean, we're obviously not going to do anything. We're working our way through Europe. I mean, we're not going to say anything about the Germans, because it's self-evident. Anyway, carry on. So you've got Venice, and it's now become gorged on the wealth of other cities, which it has effectively plundered.

Okay. Is that unfair? Not particularly. So where do we go from? How do we get to the Fifth Crusade? Wow. And beyond. And beyond, because it's almost entering double digits.

towards the end, isn't it, as a movement? Well, we just stopped being numbered, yeah. Yeah. A crusade, but is what you see in it. Well, look, you get, so 20 years on from... One of the lessons of history is that people are very quick to forget why things didn't work. And it's often said that politicians should read more history

because then they'd understand, you know, like the past will teach you. And that's bullshit. Lots of politicians read history. And they go, now I know how not to fact. it up. Now I'm so wise and clever. I won't make the same mistakes and they do the same thing. The version of that. A decade and a bit on from the Fourth Crusade, there's still a sense that, well, you know, we, Jerusalem still hasn't been won back. And you have the rise to power of, well, there's a Pope called Innocent the Third.

Innocent III is sort of maybe the sort of the, quote-unquote, greatest of the medieval popes. I mean, whose whole program of his papacy is about bolstering the power of popes over princes. And he weaponizes the crusade as a sort of tool of the papacy, which he just sort of, anywhere he looks, right? And so Innocent III, for example, is the Pope who tries to sort of prepare a crusade against England because he's fallen out with King John. Innocent the Third is the Pope who sets the groundwork for the Albigensian Crusade,

a crusade against Cathars, basically vegetarian beatniks in the south of France. Innocent III, you know, massively takes the idea of the crusade and just like, yeah, any enemy of mine is a valid target of crusading. So we start to see the metastasizing of crusading from the very early 13th century onwards. there is still a sort of an idea that, well, the thrust of this movement ought to be towards Jerusalem, but what's the best way to get there? Now, in the Fourth Crusade, the one where Constantinople was burned, there had been a plan which was like, Constantinople then onto Alexandria, Nile Delta, and we'd go through Egypt

and up to Jerusalem that way. Evidently, that was abandoned. The Fifth Crusade takes this idea and sort of revives it. Okay, we're going to have a crusade, and it sort of takes place in the years around 1220. We can't go straight to Jerusalem, that's proven too difficult. We're going to go through Egypt via the Nile Delta, and there is, it gets really grubby and messy. There is a very long series of sieges of cities, principally the city of Damietta in the Nile Delta,

and attempts to go up the river towards Cairo, effectively, and hit the Sultan there. And once we've softened up Egypt, you can make your way into the Holy Land. And it goes wrong, very wrong. the crusade is a massive loss of life lots of disease

there are some sort of picturesque moments like Francis of Assisi turns up at the Fifth Crusade France of Assisi turns up at the foot this is a good modern example I just one popped into my mind

it's really good do you remember how big football fans are you yeah I know exactly where you're going with this I'm going to Gaza right yeah you are yeah yeah yeah Rallmot yeah Rallmot is

is running a mock in the northeast, and Gaza decides that he's going to go and talk Motie down and brings him a fishing rod and some Newky Brown. And a basket of fried chicken. This won't make any sense if you have American subscribers. Who are like the majority, but carry on. American. There was a guy called Gaza.

Put all that aside. Prince Vasisi turns up at the Viscrcrucet and says he's going to sort it all out by converting the Sultan al-Kamil to Christianity. And he, yeah, that's what the Sultan Al Camille says. Fortunately, Francis Vassi, he barks with laughter rather than barking cut his head off. But the upshot of the Fifth Crusade is a lot of falling out among Christian Powers and everybody goes home having achieved vanishingly little.

And from this point on, things just start to dissolve. And there are no more significant. The era of the sort of first through third crusades, these big, from one of a better term, international missions led by heads of state, is by and large done. I mean, the most significant thing that happens is that, the sort of analogous is that the Holy Roman Emperor

Frederick Hoenschdalfen, and I'm choosing my words carefully because he gets deposed as Holy Roman Emperor and excommunicated four times with falling out with the papacy. But he brokers a peace deal briefly with Al-Kamil the Egyptian Sultan for power sharing in Jerusalem. I mean these days you would give the guy the Nobel Peace Prize, his reward, alas, is to be excommunicated four times by the papacy.

But you know what? People don't always get what they deserve. So there's a brief moment, late 1220s through early 1240s, where Jerusalem is accessible. And there's all collapses in the 1240s. And thereafter, you know, all the dynamics of the politics of the Middle East start to change. They start to change because in... Egypt, there is the rise of a group called the Mamluks, originally slave soldiers, the model for the Unsullied in Game of Thrones, who rise up in a palace coup and become the kind

of dominant Islamic force in the region. And you also have the arrival on the scene from way, way east of the Mongols. And the great struggle of those years really is Mongols versus Mamluks. what had once been, you know, a small but significant group of Christian crusader states is whittled down to just the tiniest sort of little bit on the coast, effectively a few cities and castles. And it becomes more and more and more untenable. Until you get to the 1290s, early 1290s and there's almost nothing left. The castles and the cities are being besieged one by one, and eventually Aker, the last remaining bastion of the crusader states on the mainland,

that falls and is evacuated in a sort of... This isn't a very triumphalistic heroic story, is it then? Did I say it was? No, you didn't. But the reason I asked that question is, over my lifetime, the story of the crusades and the public consciousness has evolved. So when I was a kid, you'll relate to this because of a similar age, the Robin Hood movie with Kevin Costner. Oh, yes, that comes out.

That's plonked in crusader, isn't it? Exactly. And Crusades are something cool and exciting and something people talk about in that way. Now it's almost like a stick to beat the West, Western Europe with quite often in discussions and debates. So, you know, well, you say that this is happening, but what about the Crusades?

There's been this transformation, but really what it sounds like to me, is it wasn't a particularly successful set of invasions or whatever you might call it. It was really over the course of those several centuries basically a failure, ultimately, right? It's a weird blip. Yeah. Ultimately. Yeah.

Yes. It's a weird aberration in the longer history of that region, really. And to go back to a point you guys pressed earlier on, yeah, if the First Crusade, and 1099 had gone another way. We wouldn't be sitting here talking about, we might be sitting here talking about something else, and I would have been enjoying that as well, but we wouldn't be talking about this, I don't think.

And part of those problems are basically structural, that it's like it's very difficult to reign very far away, very expensive, and there's a draining of political will and economic will to support these places. there's the fact that from the papacy of Innocent the Third onwards

crusading is abused by popes until by the time you're in the 14th century when you have a papal schism so there are two and sometimes three popes anyone fighting any war against anyone in the West can just like ring up the Pope as it were hey can this be a crusade sure and so you've got kind of

little petty wars between Christian kingdoms in the, you know, in the Liberian Peninsula, and both sides have got their Pope to call it a crusade. Crusading starts to become so ubiquitous that it's almost meaningless. That's not to say that the dream dies. Actually, the dream persists, increasingly a fantasy, but the dream persists, so that, you know, throughout the 14th century, I mean, you start to see the rise of the Ottomans as the kind of chief, Islamic power in the Eastern Mediterranean. There's a menace

to the Christian citizens and the Balkans. There are repeated attempts to raise kind of multinational Christian armies and take them to the east and to sort of hold back the Ottomans as it were. And the legacy of that is still

sort of dimly, maybe not dimly imprinted on the Balkans today. Again, you're old enough to remember the Yugoslavian wars of the late 20th, early 21st century. What was I going with that? Impact of the Crusaders, the sense I was... Oh, sure, right. But the dream persists. So you have...

Well into the 15th century, arguably... Well, no, definitely into the 16th century. Great kings like of England, like Henry V, even Henry VIII, believing that if the conditions are propitious and they just sort of get their kind of house in order at home, then they will go on crusade. And this idea that we'll take, Jerusalem becomes this, or remains at any way.

It probably becomes, rather than remains, this dream, the ultimate sort of goal is to take back Jerusalem as Christian hands, such that even in 1917, Jerusalem fall, the Ottomans, Jerusalem falls, and Alambi goes into Jerusalem, there's instructions, do not call this the last crusade. What are the papers say? Last crusade. And now, I mean, all the politics of that region have obviously changed, but the idea of the crusade is still imprinted on the minds of lots of people in the world today. And it's not just the crusade against, you know, diesel engines or litter or whatever. You see it in the manifestos of people like Anders Grafick is a good example, you know, Norwegian mass murderer.

You see it repeatedly. I mean, when ISIS, Daesh, what do you want to call them, were at their most powerful, I suppose, during the, you know, the Syrian, Iraqi crisis a few years ago, everything is framed, propaganda is framed in terms of the Crusades. I remember being, I tell this story in the book I read about the Crusades in 19. Just after I finished writing my book about the Crusades, Easter 2019, I went on holiday to Sri Lanka with my family.

And we were due to stay in a hotel in Colombo on Easter Monday, the day before we came home. and Easter Sunday I took a Tuk-tuk through Hickadoo, little surf town on the Suramka South Coast, and the Tuk-tuk driver turned around and said, hey, you hear what happened at Colombo? No, I didn't hear. He goes, suicide bombers blew up a load of hotels and churches, killed hundreds of people. Tell me, friend, did they bro up the Shangri-La? Yeah, your hotels were wrong. So had I been one day away from my booking for Easter Sunday rather than Easter Monday,

I might well have been sitting with my kids in the breakfast room when suicide bombers blew up that particular hotel. tell, only telling this story because when the offshoot of Al-Qaeda, ISIS put out their statement claiming responsibility for it, they said, we attacked crusaders celebrating their infidel holiday. So the idea that, I mean, I would have definitely counted in the minds of the suicide bomber on that day as a crusader. So with my young daughters at that time. So my point is that not just the idiomatic use of, crusading, but the kind of this idea that this is unf- I made a joke about the 100 years war not being

over earlier, well, the idea that the crusades aren't over is much more serious because it is, it is there in the minds of lots of people today. It's so interesting how it's, because you tell the story, and the story, fascinating though it is, as Constantine has said, seems one of failure. It's actually quite grubby. It's not particularly heroic, but it has passed into legend. And it's not just passed into legend in the Christian world, but it's also the Islamic world as well.

And the word crusade, when you think about crusaders, it conjures up an image into the point where you go and watch England in a World Cup final. There's people dressed up as crusaders, and I never got it, but now I think, oh, misery and failure, of course. That's your connection. I don't think they might agree. And I wouldn't say it to their face. No, no, no.

Well, I remember now, I remember, gosh, I remember being on holiday in a, I forget which holiday destination it was, but I was in a water park. It had so many fancy holidays. You know, well, what can I say? The books are selling well. There was water slides. My kids and I like water slides. And there was somebody, you know, an English guy on holiday abroad,

and beneath the sort of the scarlet red of the sunburn, You could make out a Templar warrior with a red cross and the tunic and the sword aloft and some sort of deus vault type slogan. And I said, I might go and explain to the dude that the Templars are actually basically culturally French and I was heavily dissuaded from doing that. My point is that, yeah, a lot of the iconography of crusading has been adopted by people who fancy that they share an interest with what they are. imagine crusading was all about.

That's, yeah, like, and it occurs on both sides. But there are elements, whenever history sort of generates legend, it often creates things that are picturesque, that you can shut your eyes and think you can imagine. And those are always very attractive. as analogies, as symbols, as memes, particularly in the world, you know, the image-driven meme world we live in today.

And so, you know, I mentioned Deus Volt, the idea of the temple are holding the sword aloft. You see that shared, it must be shared hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of times every week online, as a sort of rallying image for people today who have particular ideas about relationships between Christians and Muslims

in their own countries or internationally. And assume, the minute you start to dig into the history, you see that, yeah, there's one view that is this, is just a whole failure and a mess. And if you're dumb enough to share a picture of a Templar holding a sword and think that it stands for the sort of the great resilience of Christian civilization, you want to ask yourself, what happened to the Templars between 30 and 07,

and 1314, which they were turned on by the Christian kings and burned and accused of heresy. And so perhaps not your best model for the kind of resilience and unity of the Christian world in the face of Islamic assault. It was just like French on French violence. But that, you know. What's not to like? I think you're very down on the French. We are just comedically speaking. We have to be. Dan, it's been absolute pleasure. One thing we haven't. talked about, perhaps you'll do another time, is your new book about Henry V. Right.

Who's a monarch about whom I actually know nothing whatsoever. Do you make? I've seen the play, but that's about it. Yeah. Something. Well, I mean, Henry V, even on his last military campaign, was reading Chronicles of the First Crusade. He himself fancied being a crusader. So it's all connected. Well, I look forward to reading it. Thanks so much for coming in. We're going to go to a substack for questions from our audience. Before we do, as you know, the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be.

I was thinking you were going to ask, does he have the Knights Templar tattooed on his chest? He's got everything else. No, but I've been to Razook tattoo in Jerusalem, which is supposedly the oldest tattoo shop in Jerusalem. They claim to date back to the 14th century, and they do pilgrim tattoos. And this is a sort of 500-year-old, the fragment of the stamp,

and they do it broadly speaking with the same method that pilgrims have been getting tattooed in Jerusalem. Not that I went as a pilgrim and went as a historian, but I just liked tattoos. so I got tattooed there. I don't know. Like, I feel like I've spent a lot of the time in this last hour or so,

like attacking the premises of your questions. You have. Yeah. And I'm going to do that again because this whole notion that what's the thing we're not talking about is like you're deliberately misunderstanding,

like, we started off talking about that communications revolution. It's just slagging us off for no reason now. We haven't done anything wrong. There's a way we began. I'm not slagging you. I'm disagreeing with you.

And that's an important difference. I don't believe. Yeah. Important difference. Tell us why we're wrong. Where I think you're wrong, and I think you're slightly cynically sort of like clickbaiting people.

And I understand why, because there's a commercial imperative, is to say that there are... But we're being honest here. I'm sorry, we're being honest. You've interviewed my mentor, David Starkey, and he too would be honest with you. Yeah, he'd be very fucking honest.

You're not being honest with you. If I learned anything for David, it's this. There is nothing under God's... like BDI that is not being discussed right now on the internet. This idea that we live in this age of some information control, which are things we really need to talk about aren't being talked about, is bollocks. Everything's being talked about. The difficulty of navigating the modern world

is finding out what's important and what's not important. So I don't have an answer for you. I think we've talked a lot and I've really enjoyed it as well. And what I do want to say, so maybe here's my answer. what's not done enough is disagreement in a civil manner. And we began our conversation off camp, talking about how the idea between debate and how discussion has moved in the course of my lifetime from debate to polemic.

People are either sort of violently agreeing with each other or just talking over the top of each other. And one thing I've enjoyed in part today is to be able to disagree with you guys in a friendly and constructive manner. So thank you for having me on your show. Thank you very much. And go fuck yourself. No, I enjoy talking to you.

I had to do that just for the comedic effect. But actually, we always love having people like you who've got a very strong set of opinions who are not going to agree for the sake of agreeing and who recognize that actually some of the best insights, I think, happen when people are happy to have their own opinion and they're not offended by difference. Yeah, but here's the thing.

It's like, and it's bad for business, and I'm serious about that, because what's more and more evident is that because the way that information and discussion is commercialized now, it relies on extremity rather than agreement, right? I disagree with that. I mean, look, our channel has 1.2 million subscribers

as this is going out. Yeah. Well, first time we mentioned it on the table. Yeah. We're doing pretty well, And the reason that, like, all the feedback that we get when people come up to us in the street or email in is, I love the fact that you talk to different voices and you let people speak. And you only, and look, by the way, we've had robust debates with people on the show, but it's when we actually disagree. Like, if there's a genuine disagreement about things that we both feel strongly and we are confident enough that we know enough to disagree on, I'd go to with you for an hour. In this context, you're the expert. I want to hear what you think. And if you want to pick away at the foundations of our questions, that makes for a more entertaining show for everybody else. So I think actually you're 100% right, which is, just, no, no, we're not going to stop there because I can't end on agreement. There is a model for content creation, which is you get the craziest people from both sides

in a room together and you let, it's a kind of modern bear baiting type of situation. It's a freak show. It's a freak show. But also, there's always something to go. against with that model. If people are doing that, other people are going to crave the opposite of that, which is this. And that's why we've had the moderate levels of success that we've had, is because we do actually want to have a discussion. And if there is a disagreement, we'll explore it. But ultimately, it is about finding out what your opinion is. And, you know, it's been a great pleasure having on the show for that reason. Yeah. Thank you very. Yeah. So head on over to Substack. We're going to ask Dan your

questions. And he's going to pick up the premises of your questions as well. So you're going to see what it feels like. It's not nice. Did the Children's Crusade have its own Greta Thunberg figure, or was it all led by adults? What was the scene back in the day during the Crusades of regard to Christian conversion throughout the Western world?