The Crusades: A Complete Guide

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history.com/subscribe. The Crusades, a series of terrible wars spanning two centuries, holy wars, European knights, orders of warrior monks, invading what we now call the Middle East in a series of desperate attempts to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity.

The Crusaders believed that they were carrying out the work of God, and they hoped to return home wealthy and cleansed of their sins. Their Muslim opponents fought very much the same thing. Kingdoms and principalities rose and fell, their fate dependant on the sword's blade. 200 years, millions dead, massive seizures, savage battles, innumerable skirmishes and bushes

and raids. Welcome down to those history at Weathernix, three episodes. I'll be joined by historian Steve Tibel, as we bring you a new many series, the complete history of the Crusade. Steve is the author of several books on the Crusades, including his latest Assassin's

and Templars, a battle in myth and blood. He knows everything that there is to know about this period of history, so we're lucky to have him with us today.

From the first Christ, that first rallying call in Claremal to the last stand on the smashed

“burning ramparts of Acre, this is everything you need to know about the Crusades from”

start to finish. Steve, thanks so much for coming on. No, it's lovely to be here, Dan. It's a big one today. I'm going to go in but up for this, not to be so first of all, we've got a lot to get through.

First big question, why the Crusades, can you just try and give me a sense of what is that impulse that's seen as Europeans March East? Yeah. Wow, that's the big one. If I think, if we knew the answer, definitively we'd, you know, would be right in the

book of it. What's important to understand is that there are so many bigger forces that play here. It's very easy to talk about, you know, one-man doing this or one-man doing that. And in reality, it's far bigger. You almost have to look back into the 11th century where there's major climate change

on the steps. So it's not even about individuals. It's almost anthropology and it's certainly not originally religion. So you have a whole bunch of, of nomads, pastoralists and the steps. Climate change towards the middle of the 11th century forces them into activity, you know,

they're animals are dying, their waters going, they've got nowhere to go. So they have to move, they have to move. And in most cases they moved west and pushed west into either Byzantine areas or Arab controlled areas. So they have to get into the Middle East to survive.

And it's one of those things where, you know, these guys were nominally Muslim, but they weren't theologians. You know, these are the pretty rough guys. They still love astrology, they love hard-leaker, you know, they love drugs. These are not orthodox Muslims and they're not moving because of religion, they're moving

because of climate change and anthropology.

“So ironically, I think the two biggest forces that propel the crusades are the ones that we”

think of as being modern in that climate change and migration. And the combination of those two is, you know, incredibly strong. And so these step peoples, they are, among other places, they're crashing into what we now called Turkey. That's the, that's the survey area, the Byzantine Empire, their Christians, they so put

the back single, they're asking for help. Yeah, very much. So it's Gotham City, but it goes much further than that. So they attack the Byzantine Empire, Anatolia, as it is, Turkey, as we'd call it now. But they also moved down into Syria, Palestine, at different points, they take Jerusalem.

They basically give everybody a good kicking.

And that happens regardless of religion. Because I think, as a lot of historians, European, we tend to take a Eurocentric perspective. And we kind of think, oh, well, it's all about us. You know, it's all about a clash of cultures between, you know, Europeans in the Middle East or Christians versus Islam, in reality, when they no man survived, because it's not

really driven by religion, they just pile into everybody, all the local states to the

These guys are not sort of their equal opportunity bandits, and they're attacking the Byzantines.

“They're attacking the Egyptian, the Fasmid Empire in Egypt, they're knocking out all the”

local Syrian Arab states as well. And you're absolutely right, the Bat signal from Byzantium pulls in the Crusaders. But equally, the Fatimids in Egypt, you know, they're equivalent to the Bat signal goes out. They're pulling in Africans, sub-Saharan Africans, slaves, or as mercenaries. You get all the Arab states calling in guys to help them.

It's basically a huge military and anthropological convention, and they're pulling in everybody

from all over the known world. And for 200 years, that is the kind of, you know, mass mayhem that the Crusades are. And as you get with mass mayhem, it's a sex in, yeah, sex and all sorts of people. But what about so that's the pull? There is some push.

I mean, there's the Pope famous stands up and there's like, let's go to the Holy Land and carve out and there's something going on there. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, again, the old tropes, there are there are many old tropes.

That's a good thing about the Crusades. Everybody loves it. So there's plenty of scope for over generalization. I think in the past, there have been people who felt that it was kind of proto-European imperialism.

“I think from a Western perspective, we have to remember that the Middle East was not traditionally”

a Muslim area. It was actually a Christian area. It was part of the Roman Empire, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land, Turkey. These were all Christian countries with a Christian population before the Muslim invasions of the 7th century and then again, these kind of Neo Muslim guys coming in from the stabs.

So it's not a sense of people invading. They were the Crusaders who would have seen what they were doing as helping to recover old Christian lands and the call from the East, the call from Byzantium or from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, whoever you think did make the call, who pressed the button on the bad signal. That would have been seen as our guys from Western Europe coming to protect their Christian

compatriots in the East. But still, big Christian communities throughout what we now call the Middle East. Absolutely. And they have been until fairly recently. In fact, we don't have census data.

You don't have a lot of quantitative data, but it is pretty clear that the majority of the population of the Crusader states, the countries that the Crusaders established there, were still Christian. Okay. So the majority of this question, there was a big Muslim minority.

But most of the people who lived there were Christians either Catholic Crusaders or Greek Orthodox or Jacobites or Malkides or all different kinds of Christians, but it was a big melting pot. And it was a very big ethnic melting pot. In a way that again we don't appreciate.

We tend to sing of the Crusaders these kind of white guys invading the Middle East. But in fact, most Crusader armies on the ground, most frankish armies would have consisted mainly of non-Europeans. They would have been Arabs or Syrians or Armenian locally local Christians. Yeah.

Okay. Well, let's get the first Crusade underway. The Pope gives a stirring call to arms. Doesn't he? He does.

And young men flock to the colors and decide to go to the East. What taught me just, highlight the first Crusade? What's going on? Yeah.

The problem is it wasn't just young men.

“I think what the Pope had in mind in his marches we can tell was that it would be a military”

expedition. And what you want from military expedition are people with weapons, resources, skills, you know, kind of important things like that. What you don't want is a bunch of kind of weirdos, religious fanatics, women and children. These are hindrance that take in food that the fighting men could have, they are endangered

to themselves and so on. But part of the tragedy of the first Crusade was that so many people answered the call. And I think although you can say the ultimate causes of the Crusades are not religious, you know, whatever it might be, climate change, migration. The proximate causes were often religious, you know, those were the kind of things

that motivated individuals. Yeah.

And I think even I, you know, however religious we are, we can never be as religious as

they were. For them, it's like, wow, they really did believe that there are immortal souls at danger if they broke their word, if you committed a sin, you would have another thousand years

However, you know, they lived in that realm of spirituality that's actually hard to even imagine now or take serious. And so there is something really exciting going on for those people, though, or certainly you know, they're caught up in this passion and there's a big movement, okay. So the first Crusade.

Absolutely.

Our people are kings and kings going on this Crusade or are they sort of second sons

without any prospects here at home, they're not going to inherit the estates. Yeah, it does tend to be the, you know, the second layer. Okay. There you go. It's probably not second sons looking to find their fortune, but it used to be an idea

of a kind of a pro-ty Marxist explanation for the Crusades, but in reality to go on Crusade,

“you nearly always bankrupted yourself, you know, the chances of, if you want to get”

rich, quick, sort of project, this wouldn't be it. No, we've got William the Conqueror's oldest son, Robert. He goes, doesn't he? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And, you know, does well. But then comes straight back. And so it, again, it comes down to piety. And that is the trigger. I mean, powerful people were pious and poor people were pious.

And the, the piety lives alongside a lot of other motivations, you know, as human beings were very complicated, horrible creatures, you know, we can have all these conflicting ideas in our heads. And there's a simultaneously there. Right.

Well, let's, let's chart the course of that Crusade. And marching over land or are they taking ships, they're marching over land, critically, they take off in waves. So they don't go off as, you know, you would think the obvious thing is to go one big army

and then off we go and do it like, in reality, that's never going to be possible, because

they don't have the logistics, you know, if you're living off the land, you cannot go in one big lump.

“So you have to go in dribs and traps, but worse, which is bad, as you can imagine, on some”

levels, because it means you're arriving piecemeal. But it's even worse because you get a whole bunch of guys who don't prepare. So I, so ironically, to get, to get a proper Crusade together takes time, because you need to get your guys together, you need to get your money together, you get your transport. It's all the boring stuff, logistics, but that's what makes it work.

But the really enthusiastic ones, the, you know, the porppers, who maybe had a few lower nights with them, but they were really religious enthusiasts. They really felt that, you know, that a new world was happening. This is like a change in the entire world. And they set off first.

They just start walking. They do.

And they're no good, you know, there are menace themselves, there are menace to the local

Church communities who, they, they massacre and kill on the way in the Rhineland. It's very unhelpful. For the paper seed doesn't want them to do this, they're, in fact, they're our entire parts of the Crusade that are closed down by the paper seed because they're killing Jews. And it's not a good thing.

A little bit too bottom up, you know, the paper seed wants to bag us, exert some control here. Yeah, absolutely. It, this, the paper seed is at the heart of the Crusading movement. I mean, whichever way you cut the cake, whatever answer you, of course, you come up with. The paper seed, though, big propelling power in moving it forward.

And they, and they encourage much more organized contingents. The trouble is that you can't stop some of the guys just getting over excitedly. They did that thing. What happened? I mean, it's astonishing they're joining success really isn't it, because they, but

they do erupt into the Near East into, you know, what is now Turkey, what is now Syria Lebanon, Israel Palestine? And actually, what, what happens though, because it doesn't, amazingly, it doesn't go that badly. Yeah, I know.

I know.

“The fact, I think, is the, the bigger tragedy of the Crusades is that it all went so”

incredibly well. And it gave everybody a full sense of expectations and capabilities. They thought, "Oh, Blimey, you know, God is on our side, good Lord, literally." And, you know, anything is possible. So they, they took the Ovaland route, they, they fought on their way through, they had

some Byzantine help, they, they had successful seedures, they discovered fabulous relics. But it was almost like science fiction for people who didn't get out of the village very much. You know, they were traveling thousands of miles, seeing objects that they believed had been touched by God, had been, you know, the Lancid had pierced Jesus, and that God

was on their side and it helped them against huge odds. What, what they didn't fully appreciate, I think, is that they had arrived as an incredibly good time, almost by coincidence, the whole of the Muslim world had, had kind of fractured at that point, a whole load of the local leaders had died, there was a lot of infighting. And there was no coordinated Muslim response.

There was also very little G-hat, you know, we, we'd tend to think of it as being crusaders versus G-haters. Now, but G-haters as a, as a movement took a long time to gain, gain steam.

the region and making a nuisance in themselves. So the real tragedy is that it was so successful against all the odds, and they do capture Jerusalem. They do, 1099, the guys get down there, they put it under a loose siege, because there aren't that many of them in Jerusalem as, you know, has decent walls, and it's, you know, big,

big of a city, but they take it and again, they take it very quickly, they then get confronted by the, the Fatimids, who, who, by this time, the Fatimids are in control of Egypt. They have an empire, and they, they were in control of Jerusalem as well. So for them, they, again, they had seen the Crusaders as a bunch of, you know, weirdos from, from a far off place, and they had seen them as almost useful, because they were

giving the Sunni Muslims a good kicking, and the Fatimids were sheaths. And then when the Crusaders were, for so successful, they thought, oh my God, you know, we've just replaced one enemy rather than other. So, so a huge, Egyptian army burst into the holy land, leaving with the Crusaders with one final big battle, and they, and they were hugely outnumbered.

And in the face of such huge numbers, the Crusaders did the, the really weird, but correct thing, which was, they just marched straight out of them, surprised them. I still don't quite understand how an army of whatever it was, 5,000 infantry can surprise anyone, walking through a desert, but they, they did, and they utterly smashed the Egyptian army.

Again, everybody thinks, wow, God's on outside, yeah, and you can understand, it must have felt like that.

So, at the end of that first crusade, it looked, yeah, as you say, it's gone, it's gone swimming

“in, yeah, and I guess that's why it's why we're having this discussion, because it's”

not about the Crusades anymore to come back, and if that had been stamped out, it would have just been a further exposure. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You've got the establishment of these Christian states, through what, you might call

the holy land, right? So, so there are, there is, you know, there's Antioch, there's the area around Jerusalem. Yes. There's a desa, there's what became known as the County of Tripoli, which is modern day Lebanon, the, the, the important thing to remember is that most people on the Crusade

saw it as an event and a journey. So, most people thought, okay, this is, wow, great. This is an armed pilgrimage, a very violent pilgrimage, we're going to go to Jerusalem, and do the holy things, and then, at this point, I haven't seen the wife and kids for three years, most of them, maybe three quarters of the Crusaders just went home.

And you, you can't blame them, I mean, they, you know, a lot of them are died, a lot of them, and they'd seen things, they couldn't ever forget, and they were, they were going home, but it did create a big problem, because if you saw the Crusade as being the recovery of the holy land, rather than, you know, just, you know, visit, then you had to defend it.

So it was going to hold on to it. Exactly. And this now is the recurring problem, exactly. Exactly. This is the story is the next 200 years, and this is the tragedy, because having got there

by, by luck really, and, and, and having got a full sense of your own capabilities, you'll

“then stuck with the much bigger problem of, how do you hang on?”

So for 200 years, you have relatively small Crusader states surrounded, outnumbered, capable of being overwhelmed, if anybody can get there, act together, and they're hanging on by their fingernails the whole time. Right.

Well, that lets get to the second Crusade, so we're moving forward almost 50 years.

What, why is there, why is there a second Crusade? Yeah. Well, the, the Muslim neighbors are getting their act together, as you can imagine, and why wouldn't they? And there's one guy in particular, called Zanghi, who's a very, very brutal, and very

effective, but very, very brutalized character, who leads his arm as against the county of Odessa, and, and in particular, the city of Odessa. And there's a now where is Odessa since last year? That is Syria Turkey, we actually don't know where the county was. Okay.

In total, and this is a sure sign of a place that's in danger, is that you don't know where the East and front is, where it was so fluid, and, and the thing about Odessa is that it, it, kind of, leads out into the steps, it's the route where these nomads are coming down from.

“So, if you, if you want to think of a really bad place to set up a colony, that's”

it, you know, because you're going to be outnumbered, and you're going to have these really tough guys coming down the whole time.

So you would say, probably, that's going to be the first crusader state to go, and that's

exactly what happened. So Zanghi, and his huge army, go through it, 1144, and that starts to chip away at the, at the

of it.

“So you can imagine, this is, this is a shock to the guy's back in Europe, because I”

think they'd had this impression that somehow, because God clearly was on this, I'd

made it possible in the first place, that the crusader states were going to last forever,

and they didn't need a lot of help, you know, in reality, it's quite the opposite. They needed all the help they could get. So the second crusader was a response to the fall of Odessa, and it was interesting in part of the process was getting people like the Templars involved, and that, the Templars and the hospitalers, the military orders, were another part of that response to the manpower

problem. So you get this kind of weird hybrid organizations created to create almost a standing army. So you get these, their monks, almost technically monks, so they're celebrate their religious, but on the other hand, probably Europe's most elite warriors, so it's a funny

hybrid. Funded for all over Europe, you send you donations in and it keeps the things all as in business. Yeah, absolutely. It's like an EU rapid reaction force, except nothing's rapid.

Yeah, it's not a national force, it's a panurically.

I've always liked the crusader because of the extraordinary road trip that the King of France

and his wife go on. Because the King of France takes his wife, but he's a total loser, she's obviously quite tough. And she goes, I'm not having it, and they get divorced since they get back, but he's

“always travel with your partner, I think.”

Well, you can make it, we can come on to end with the first later, it can work out, but you're absolutely right, it didn't, in that case. And second crusader, achieve anything? It tried to, it had good strategic conclusions, at the end, basically, most of the second crusader couldn't fight their way through Asia Minor.

So the French got cut up quite badly, but some of them got through, including the King. The Germans, including the Emperor, got cut up very badly, but they did some of them made it through. So you find, by the end of the 1140s, they're in the Holy Land, they're in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was the main crusader state.

It's clear that they can't retake a deser, it's too far away, it really is bridge too far. So the local guys, the Franks, the crusaders who'd settled down, married Arab women, and created these kind of colonial villages, persuaded them to attack Damascus, which is, as

“you know, as an old Christian city, if the crusaders can recover Damascus, they've kind”

of broken out from the coastal literal, and then you can have a proper colonial thing. You know, you can actually have fiefs for your knights, you can bus people in, they can start farms, and so on. So you actually have a lot more solidity to the kingdoms. So it's strategically, it's, you know, great objectives, you can't, you can't fault

the objective, but, as always, with the crusades, it comes down to manpower, and you

get this weird thing where the guys agree to the siege anti-Occ, sorry, Damascus, they head off there, they start their siege, but there are so few of them, they never actually encircle the city even, so the whole time their guys reinforcements, volunteers, jihadists coming into Damascus, bolstering the defences and so on. So in a sense, within a few days, the second crusade gets to Damascus to the siege it, and

they're the ones under siege, you know, they're stuck in the suburbs, they've got no real leverage, militarily, and in fact, it's only the common sense of the local, local Franks that gets manned, persuades them that they've got to go, you know, if we don't go now, we're not going at all. And the local Franks get castigated for that, you know, as in all your traders and you

condescend to all this, but in reality, they saved the day, they just saved their lives, yeah. It's an interesting one because it's the first time you can see a real fracture between the different Christian communities, so you've got the kind of locals who are very multi-ethnic, very relatively tolerant actually, because most of the population are

not Catholic Christians, they're other kinds of Christians, and the local crusaders, and that is why crusaders are literally not that helpful, they're just basically tourists, yeah, they come in, they don't really know how to fight when they get out there, they make a nuisance of themselves, and then they go, you know, it's like what, you know, perfect, yeah.

And they, okay. So, so no fundamental decisive result from the same crusade, there's plenty of decisiveness that it goes after that, we get saladin, the great commander, he absolutely wipes the floor with the Christian states, that's a battle of hat in, yes.

good, but in response to that catastrophe, and then in the aftermath captures Jerusalem. I know, I know, that was a big moment.

“Yes, I mean, he does a huge amount, if you think the, up to that point, there had been”

a whole country created, there was something like 250 to 300 frankish pulani settlements,

you know, whether the European guys with Arab women and you're into third, fourth generation

by Dan, so a very mixed Christian rural community, lots of towns, and he just wiped them out, you know, the guys ran for it or enslaved in the aftermath of, cut in, a lot of the guys were actually fighting at hat in, it was a big crusader army by their standards, but they ran numbered and totally beaten. And then when Saladin got to Jerusalem, which we think of as, you know, this huge, easily

defensible city, he took it very easily, because it's a liability, and you, you find this, well, talk about this more in a minute with Richard, the lion heart, but Jerusalem

“is the classic kind of temptation, it's got a honey pot, everybody once said, because”

it's holy, it's got, it's redulent, but it's landlocked, it's got almost, you know, very little water supplies, and it's very, very difficult to defend, so Saladin is actually delighted that a lot of crusaders go there to defend it, because he can just do all the difficult stuff, which is taking out castles and things like that, and then he can come back, and effectively, it's kind of like the, you know, the Germans in the channel island

showing the war, it's a fabulous way of keeping, you know, five divisions of the enemy. So Saladin is racing across the whole land, he's, he's getting rid of all these sort of crusader communities, these, these local crusader communities, he takes Jerusalem, and

that's when we get the third crusade. Yes, now and that's where you come into rapid reaction

as well, so if you think, and again, this is the other tragedy of the crusader states, partly it's like a man, but it is also about time and geography, so one of Saladin's cavalry armies can go across the whole of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in two days, easily, I was not, not problem, when the battle of Hathain took place, you know, it takes a few hours to wipe out the entire army, it, it's nearly four years before a well-prepared rapid reaction

force in the form of the third crusade can get back there, so you can be wiped out in an afternoon and, and have to wait three or four years for the other response, and the response when it happens is surprisingly effective, actually, and again, it's sort of with hindsight,

it's a bit of a tragedy because if they just let it go at that point, you could say, okay,

well, there wouldn't be another century of agony there, but the guys, Philip of France, Richard the King, Philip of France, and King Richard of England? Yeah, and despite constantly while fighting, but they're constant opponents, each other in Europe, in France, in particular, they set aside their differences, and they march together, or they sailed together. They do, and it's not a, not a happy cruise ship, no, kind of experience, these are,

yeah, their big personalities, and they don't get on, there's permanent squabbling, but they overcome that temporarily, they get together with the local forces who have been besieging Aika, which is the last big remaining city, it's actually a much more important city than Jerusalem, Jerusalem sounds great, but it's, it's important as an idea whereas Aika is actually a big, heavily defended maritime city, good links back to Europe,

“that's what you really want, and in practice that has been the real capital of the Latin”

Kingdom of Jerusalem, so they managed to recover that from from Saladin's Garrison, and then launch into a campaign against Saladin himself. Philip is coming up, throws his toys out of the front at those points. King of France goes home and proceeds to immediately attack the lines of everything. I know, what can you do? I mean, scoundrelous, I mean, absolutely terrible behavior. Yeah, and Richard the idiot stays out there. When's the famous battle?

Yes, yeah, he wins a very interesting battle at Arsouth, and it is one of those ones where it's a really unusual battle for a West European army to fight, and it does show how people like the Templars and the hospitals had been good at training European troops before they actually got into the region, because the thing that Richard did, which was the battle winner, was that he did an incredibly difficult maneuver, which is form his entire army into a box and move this box,

down the coast, shadowed by a fleet that could provide logistics, and it's the most fragile

would even dream of doing that, and they wouldn't be capable of putting it into practice. But

Richard was a very, very good soldier, and he had very, very good advices, and Saladin, eventually history bounced into that, that walking box when they got down to Arsouth, which is one of the old Crusader castles on the coast, and I'm as defeated quite heavily. And so they, and then Richard gets his fight, he sees Jerusalem, doesn't he? He turns into dead. Yeah, he's tempted. They're much all the way up there, but he doesn't recapture him,

but he has to go back, because obviously the French are attacking all his lands,

“but it brings a bit of life into the Crusader project in the homeland, doesn't it?”

No, you're absolutely right. I mean, in fairness to Richard, it isn't just, you know, he's not just acting selfishly, he's not, you know, he's not just running back because of the French, it's because all his advisors, all the smart money is saying, you know, you might be able to capture Jerusalem again, but how do we hold that? You know, because you've got to go home at some point, the Crusaders are just terrorists, and, you know, most of the local guys are now dead or enslaved.

So again, it comes back to Manpower, and he took the right decision, which is the unromantic one of seeing Jerusalem, but not going for it. But that was the right thing to do. But there are a few castles in Crusader hands, there's still a foot holding the Holy Land.

Exactly. Exactly. And that is where the third Crusade does well. It recovers a lot of the

the coast, and the coast is vital, because if you've got lines back to Europe, you've got logistics, you've got reinforcements, you've got volunteers, and terrorists, I mean, who bring money with them as well as weapons. So you're going concern as long as you've got some of those. So this is the point at which I completely lose the plot.

“No idea what comes next, but why in where is the fourth Crusade?”

Okay, fourth Crusade, well, you're not alone in losing the plot here. I personally find 13th century difficult and depressing. What can you do? You have a perfectly good 12th century, and then it's all goes to part. The fourth Crusade is a very sad one, actually, and one that's

still very, very hotly debated. You get two schools of thought. Basically, it was a Crusade

that was being sent out to the Holy Land to provide help. So that was, and it's created by the papercy like all Crusades. It gets kind of subarmed on the way. The Crusade has run out of money. The Italians who are doing all the shipping say, "Well, okay, guys, you can't pay us, but maybe, you know, I've got an idea. You can pay your way by taking a detour around these Byzantines. We've got a Byzantine prince who's on our side, he'll maybe get us in there,

“and we can help ourselves to the piggy bank that is the old Byzantine Empire."”

And the papercy is very much against this. A lot of the Crusaders are against it as well, but they don't have any way forward. If they're going across Mediterranean, they're going to do it in Italian ships. And here it's very divergent. You know, there are some people who say, "Well, the Byzantines, their Christian, this is a complete perversion of the Crusading ideal." And certainly the people, legot was against it, the Pope was against it, but couldn't stop it happening.

On the other hand, there is a history of bad blood, including massacres, between the Italian merchants, traders, and the Byzantines. So the Byzantines are not, you know, they're not mother to reasoners, they're not plastering. No good guys here. But so extraordinarily, these Italians take this Crusading army to Byzantium, to Constantinople, and end up capturing it. It's weird on weird, isn't it? Yeah, how on earth did they do that? Because this is, you know,

a city that is impregnable, really. I mean, they've been for centuries, and they've got the best battle lines. To me, it does show that the Crusaders were good soldiers. They weren't a huge number of them, but they did incredibly well. The Byzantines, you know, were, there was a lot of infightings that didn't help them either. But capturing Byzantium could have been. You could imagine that some of the guys might have rationalised it by saying, "Well, we're unifying the Christian

forces around the Mediterranean. Once we've got Byzantium resources, then we can use that to help the Holy Land." So that you could see there was some kind of theoretical logic. In reality, it's all nonsense. In fact, it's actually very negative. It takes Byzantium as a military player out of contention. And if you're a knight looking for life in the Middle East, in the Eastern Mediterranean, suddenly you've got lands in Byzantium where you're not going to get a Turkish arrow in your neck.

You know, that kind of thing. You have much more prosperity there. So it actually sucks away.

this new Frankish empire in Byzantium. Which only lasts for a few decades anyway before the locals take over again. So the fourth Crusade accidentally ends up attacking a Christian power. Yeah. And that's the app. Peter's out. Yeah. And as you say, it doesn't actually need to sort of rejuvenated Byzantium taking the fight to the Muslims of the... quite the opposite. Okay, quite the opposite. Let's get that fifth Crusade still in the early 13th century? Yeah, absolutely.

So now the guys, I think if you take a slightly helicopter view, you can say the first half of

the 13th century, the Crusaders still in with the chance. You know, they've still got enthusiasm, they can occasionally feel the decent army. And the fifth Crusade is one of those cases where the big set of European armies got together slightly piecemeal and decided to go into the

“eastern Mediterranean. And bizarrely to our eyes, they attack Egypt. You have to think, wow,”

what's Egypt got to do with it? And in fact, it looks stupid, but it is clever. It's the right thing to do. All the way through the 12th century, the guys running Jerusalem understood that Egypt was the key, because although it hasn't got all these kind of high profile, you know, it hasn't got

the celebrity locations, but it's got cash, it's got the Nile, it's got fertility, it's the cash

curve, the entire region. So if you control Egypt, you've got enough money to build armies to defend the Holy Land, it's sort of as simple as that. So the fifth Crusade goes in to try and take the old European cities, like Alexandria, and Damietta on the coast of Egypt, to help try and bring Egypt back into Christian control. It's a horror show. It is a horror show. I mean, it goes on, there is some, in a way that, again, that's part of the problem, it goes well for a while until

“it doesn't go well. So it goes well enough to encourage them to carry on in there, rather than just”

kind of hitting it as a raid and then going. But again, it Peter's out, they get given lots of

opportunities and they get chances to be brought off, which they don't take, because they want

the big prize. And actually with hindsight, that's maybe not such a bad thing. You know, again, if somebody offers you Jerusalem, that feels like it's, you know, you've done really well. In reality, what they're giving you is a poison chalice. You know, they're giving you a city that you'll put your resources into defending and then fail. So if the crusades did match the capture, capture onto these cities on the coast, if they'd held onto those, that might have been interesting.

But instead, they get sucked in the interior and it's to hellish. Yeah, this starving rump of the crusader army is wiped out. Yeah, bad, but not good. Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

“So that's the fifth. What about the sixth? So the sixth, finally enough.”

Is strangely successful. Is one of those ones where it's almost the opposite. Like the fifth has got quite a good army, but it just gets kind of sucked into this morass and can't do anything. The sixth crusade is when Frederick, who's a fighting with the Emperor Frederick, fighting with the Pope, and is actually excommunicated. So you get this bizarre thing where an excommunicated person is running a crusade and the patriarch of Jerusalem won't talk to him. He's really loud to talk to him.

Hospitals and Templars not allowed to play ball, you know, they do, but, you know, they're kind of have to be very careful what they do. So you have this guy who's really at odds with the paper, see, taking over. He doesn't have a great army. He's got a big job title, but he doesn't have a great army with it. But he's super clever and he actually has very good relations with the local Muslim players, bizarrely he gets on bad with the saltans, but more than he does with the Pope. And he

manages to negotiate quite big gains, you know, a recovery of significant parts of Galilee, he gets Jerusalem and back in history. That's the weird thing he gets, not just get Jerusalem. Without a battle. Without a battle, this is, this is diplomacy, this is, yeah, no, it's great. And then he gets, you know, the worst kind of mud thrown out of the way out of town by the Christians, who, because he's an excommunic and so it is one of these ironic things and particularly embarrassing

for the Pope, because you'd think somebody excommunicated clearly doesn't have God on his side, but he delivers the goods. But the trouble is you come back to the same problem. It's all very well, to have a line on a map, saying I've got Jerusalem and I've got whatever. But if you haven't got troops on the ground, it's, you know, again, it's just one of those holding tanks. So again, after that, the local Muslim states chip away and, yeah, in sort of, the Crusaders

states shrink. Yeah. And then we are on the 7th. Yep. I'm on the 7th. Right. So that is,

Okay. And what happens this one? Yeah, French, French to a really good, good size Crusade,

“declared by Louis 9th. Again, they go into Egypt. They've got the right objectives. They understand”

that, you know, the strategic overview. And they go in and do pretty well to start off with until they overreach themselves. And again, start believing their own propaganda. And the, the army gets sucked into a battle at Mansura, which is a town, and Crusader cavalry are not good in towns. And you find their, their kind of headstrong French knights push into the town. The Templars charge in two. Templars are actually really good. Even in a town, they managed to ride

all the way through Mansura, do some good fighting and so on. But the secular knights get into trouble. As you can imagine, you know, a cavalryman in an alleyway with French cavalryman in an Egyptian alleyway. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, exactly. Mine boggles. Yeah. But anyway, so they were being cut down and the whole army pretty much ran from there. And then from there, it just goes downhill to, until eventually, horror of horror, as you have, you know, the French king himself taking prisoner.

And he's soon to become a saint. You know, this is like a real disaster. And the whole army is captured. The survivors of captures. They're being murdered at a rate of 200, 300 a day just to, you know, cut down the, the food bill. You know, it's an absolute nightmare. And eventually, a huge ransom has paid and, and, uh, Louis and his survivors, drag all back into the Holy Land, into Acre, which is still just about in Crusade Island. It is. It's still a whole down. Yeah.

Right. So we got the eighth Crusade. Yes. I didn't take no for another one, but that's gross. Well, again, this is dear Louis. I mean, it really isn't, you know, on a very personal level, not taking no for an answer. So dear Louis, wonders back in. This is the same Louis. Same Louis.

“Yeah. 15 years later or something? Yeah. This is 1270. I think he wonders into this time.”

It's sort of the same idea as in he goes into North Africa this time. You know,

it always reminds me of Winston Churchill, you know, talking about the soft underbellion,

the idea of attacking still looking for it somewhere. Exactly. The found to be a soft underbellion, if you don't know. Exactly. Right. That's interesting. So, again, they initially went straight for what we now know, you know, Israel, Palestine, etc. Then they tried it. Now we're, so they've gone further up the coast of, yeah. So now they're going into the soft underbellion of the soft underbellion. Yeah. Um, which is is great as it kind of literally flourished, but I think most

straight, strategic think as well. So actually made, it's just words. It's not actually true. I mean, there was a thought that the, that the local leadership might become aware of the landings, what's of tune. Tuners. Tuners, actually. Well, where revising histories, so they land in cartage. And they're now a lot. They're quite a long way now. Yeah. You know, holy sight. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so it does back the question, even if they had been successful,

“what does this really achieve? And, you know, and that is, I think that is past the point,”

they're kind of clansing at the straws. You know, they're continually trying to solve this problem that you can't solve and not certainly not with the numbers of men you've gone. So, so, looing is army, uh, start a siege, uh, loo is sun dyes, then looey dyes, uh, um, the whole place sort of just collapses disease. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, and very sadly for, for dear looey, very pious guy, not, not everybody's cup of tea. I mean, he, you know, uh, he, he, he spends,

he's defeated in, in the previous crusade, he was imprisoned. He's defeated again. He dyes all on crusade in North Africa. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. So, so at least he put his money where his mouth was. He, you can't the key is not trying. Yeah. And we're on the ninth crusade now. Yeah. That's really a little offshoot, really. And again, it's, uh, it's English. So, we're back

to Edward. So, Edward, Prince Edward later, long shanks Edward the first. So, the planterians have

spat out one of their period, it's good fighting. Yes. Yes. So, after originally it was. Yeah. So, we had a couple of week ones. And now we got Edward, he's, well, he's, he's a warrior. He's, he's, he's the real thing. Yeah. So, he goes back out there. He's trying to join looey, but before he can get there, looey's dead. And rather than turning around and saying, well, you know, job done, he benefits to him, carries on. And his crusade to the holy land or his contingent is, is called

the next crusade. In reality is just a contingent of the other one. And that is the problem. You know, Edward is personally a very good leader as, as we're about to find out as, you know, as you go into English history after that. But at the time he had so few men. And when his

They've gone to. Yeah. So, they're Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, or the Rump of it, which is basically

“a few seaside towns now. And his guys are so few in number. And so, they're the climateised,”

that they just attack a couple of villages, half of them come down with dysentery. They literally, they say we've, we've been punished with hot food, they, they blame the local, well, local curry is all over. And very relatable. Yeah. Is it delicate English boys? Because I've tried with this. And they said, they go back and, and kind of, they're just about to set off again, where the, uh, the local salton bybars sets a force of assassins on them. And one of the assassins

actually becomes, um, the gods son of Edward, Edward, Edward, as he was then, a few weeks later, it becomes King Edward, um, and then to his household. And launch his and, uh, a surprise attack on him. I mean, it's really fantastic. So, Edward is in his bed chamber with his pregnant wife next to him. He's, he's unarmed, unarmed. And we even know what he's wearing. It's kind of, it's

“kind of, kingly underwear was. He was wearing, um, kind of, freely shirts, a very loose shirt,”

and, and a bribe, which they kind of like, uh, trousers like a, um, as well of trousers, I guess. So he sort of wakes up a little bit sleepy to the knock on the door to see his spy, his, his gods son, who's a spy, um, at the door. And instead of talking, instead of receiving intelligence from his spy, the guy just launches at him with a poison dagger. And Edward, being genuinely very much, you know, this is like James Bond. He, he sort of parries the blow down. The poison

dagger hits him in the hip, rub them the chest, um, but instead of falling over and, or shouting for help, um, Edward just punches the guy straight in the face, knocks him out, grabs the dagger, and stabs him under the nose, straight into the brain, and kills him instantly. So, yeah, I mean, you can see, I mean, to me, the real tragedy of that incident is that it allows brave hard to be made. Yes. But, um, if I only cry, but it was, it was good for England, I

guess, because he, he made his way back home, became king on the way. Yeah. And read his father, Henry III. Well, as my, my Welsh nine would say that it was a tragedy for us sorts of reasons. Okay. So yes. So that's the night. So the life crusade really is a very small little thing. Okay. We've now got for all of that hard work and bloodshed in treasure. We've just got a few as you say, seaside towns are early these parcels on the coast, and eventually they're stamped out.

Yeah. Absolutely. It's sort of, it's kind of, you are reduced to the kind of, you know, malgates and ramskates of the, of the, of the Levant there. There's one or two big cities that are really worth having tire, um, and, uh, Acre, uh, Antioch still exists until it was until the 1260s, um, but gradually all the Crusader cities, all the lands are being taken out, and they really just exist as a set of small fragmented entrepreneur, really. They're, they have to trade because they're

at the end of the Silk roads. They actually serve an economic purpose for, for both parties, really, the Muslims as well as the Christians. But over time that, you know, the trade routes gradually move the idea of, you had grows, and it's increasingly irritating having these kind of infidel, sort of bits and pieces just left. In the same way as, you know, Hong Kong and Macau might be irritating to a to a material China. So, you know, as Islam grows in confidence, why would you,

why would you have these infidel's hanging out there? And then, um, so finally in 1291, they're, they're snuffed out, and the, as Acre is put under siege and, and take and, and destroyed. And the Crusades, although the idea of Crusading carries on after that, that's pretty much the end of it as a going concern. And, uh, as we can talk about maybe another day, it's the, it's redundancy for some of the big players, particularly the Templars who meet their match soon afterwards.

Amazing. That was, uh, that was impressive. Thank you very much, taking us through all those Crusades.

No, thank you. I'm going to come back in the podcast soon, so we'll see you then. Thank you, Dan. Looking forward to it. [Music]

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