The Mongols and the Fall of the Crusaders

faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond.

“Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. L. Neonaga, and some of the world's leading historians, as we”

bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War 2. Just visit historyhit.com/subscrib.

Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. The podcast that dowels

into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries,

the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press from kings to poops to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into

“rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.”

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. It's 1260. It's the height of summer, and as the sun gllares over the desert sands of Egypt, four envoys mounted on horseback, bare down on the ancient and fabled city of Cairo. They've been sent to deliver a message to the new Mamluk Sultan Kutuz, a former slave soldier who's risen from bondage to seize the reigns of power along the Nile. The letter

they bring is not filled with fair tidings, forming rhetoric or diplomatic niceties. Instead, it warns of a coming storm, so bleak that all in its path tremble with fear. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies, where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts,

“our soldiers, as numerous as the sun. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness”

of your God, and then we will kill your children. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Though this is the age of the Crusader, the storm doesn't rise from the coastal fortresses of the barbarian Christians, nor from the Citadel's of Capricious Syrian Sultans. It hails from the step, the vast grassland of the far north, home to countless nomadic

horsemen. For these embodies, are mongled. They foretell the onset of a mongled tide, and making good on threats of apocalypse and catastrophe, is their speciality. Before arriving on Egypt's doorstep, the mongles have already crushed the last vestiges of soldier-quisistance in Anatolia, overrun the mountain fortresses of the Nizaria sassins, and ransacked Baghdad, the long-standing jewel of the Sunni Muslim world.

For cuturs, all portends point to more of the same. The Mamluk Sultanate Stan Square

in the sights of a 12,000-strong Legion of horsemen ready to strike at the first sign of resistance.

In the summer of 1260, resistance is exactly the path, critters and the Mamluks choose. When the monglem boys present their demands of uncompromising in Perium, an unconditional surrender, critters respond in a language the step nomads no doubt understand. He orders the four ambassadors in prison, then publicly cut in half. Their severed heads are skewed on the ramparts as V for Carion, the fate usually reserved for petty criminals.

It serves as a declaration that cuturs will not be following the precedent set by his Near Eastern neighbours. Instead, he's ready to pick up his sword, face the mongle wrath, and take his chances at war. The showdown takes place near an oasis named Ingelut, and is more than just a battle. It's a defining struggle between two rising superpowers for control of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Crusaders watching from behind the walls of their shrinking coastal kingdoms are little more than spectators, but they won't remain so for long. The victors, be it mongle or Mamluk, will turn their focus onto them next, and the last embers of Latin Crisindum in the Holy Land will be extinguished. Welcome to God Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. For the past two weeks, we've journeyed across

For almost two centuries, these so-called holy walls set Crisindum's warriors against

“the Muslim powers of Egypt and Syria, each fighting for dominion over the scorching deserts”

and sacred sites of the Holy Land, endorsed by the papacy and waged by western knights in unforgiving lands, the Crusades reshaped the course of the Middle Ages. This is an epic saga of faith, ambition, and blood. In our last three episodes, we've charted more than 150 years of history, tracing the course of the Crusades from their explosive beginnings in the 11th century, through to

the legendary campaigns of the Sultan Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Along the way, we've witnessed Norid, an infamous episode, unfolding across Medieval Crisindum, and discovered that this is far more than a straightforward tale of clashing kings and civilizations. If you haven't listened, do go back and dive into those episodes. Today, though, we come to the end game. The fall of the Crusader states, and yet,

the Crusaders themselves have very little to do with it. The crisis that envelopes the Holy Land from the year 1240, and which eventually culminates in the abandonment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291, is shaped not by popes or western armies, but by those in Cairo and on the step. The Mongols crash into the Near East, Jerusalem falls again in 1244, and the Crusaders are shocked into one last Hail Mary, the seventh Crusade, led by French King Louis IX. Out of

the chaos rises a new power. The Mamluks, who steadily dismantle the Crusader world, until nothing remains. To help us navigate this final tumultuous chapter of Crusading history, and joined by historian Nicholas Morton, author of the Mongol Storm, making and breaking empires in the Near East. And once we've traced the global story of the fall of the Crusader states, stay with us, because Eleanor is returning to help me reflect on the legacy of the Crusade,

and what this 200 year experiment ultimately left behind.

Welcome back to Go Medieval Nick, it's great to have you with us again. It's great to be back

“on the show, thanks so much Matt. I think we thought at this point we know we're heading towards”

seventh Crusade, seventh in our numbered Crusades, and we're going to bring in the Mongols here, so we were thinking, who can we talk to about Mongols and Crusades, and it's, of course, Nick Morton. But I wondered if you could help us out just to give our audience a little bit of a recap, so we're about to hit the seventh Crusade. In broad terms, what's been going on in the Holy Land for the past kind of couple hundred years? Okay, so a lot is the answer. Essentially,

you're looking at an incredibly complex and fragmented landscape. You've got major empires and territories around. So going back to around the year one thousand, for example, you have the Byzantine Empire in the northwest, which controls much of what will be modern day Turkey or Anatolia, as it's known then, as well as the Aegean in Greece. And then the remainder of much of the Middle East is made up with various different arable Kurdish leaders who are all

under the authority of the Abhazid Caliphate. And at an Egypt, you have a separate sheer caliphate. In the following years, then, though, you've got a massive invasion out of the Central Asian step region. This is the invasions of the Seljuk Turks, and they conquer the entire region, during the 11th century, with a great part of it anyway. So in order that, you have the advent of the Crusades and the foundation of the Crusader states in the coastal regions of the Near East. And then

about a little over a hundred years after that, you have the advent of a new set of invaders with the rise of the Mongols. So we're looking at a very complex region. It was already complex of all these various invasions, but it becomes even more so, not just because of the invaders themselves,

“but because there are other peoples they set in motion. And for me, that's what makes this period”

so incredibly fascinating. You've got all these different cultures. Fighting wars, conducting trade,

encountering each other for the first time, whether that's people's whose history and the Middle

East goes back for centuries, or who are relatively recent. Because that is a dangerous area of seeing this period of that we call the Crusading period, and who say to states, and we often frame

work is really great at highlighting is the fact that there are just almost innumerable facets to

“this, different cultures, different civilizations, different groups, even within Christians and Muslims,”

and as well as those alongside them. There is so much more going on than just thinking about it in terms of Christians attacking Muslims in the Near East. Yeah, it's the complexity of the landscape for me is what makes it so interesting. You've got the Byzantine attempt to try and restate their authority in Anatolia. You've got nomadic peoples, struggling against agricultural peoples. You've got interfaith rivalries and rivalries within a faith. And there's many occasions when you've got

Christians and Muslims on both sides of the battlefield, or where the battlefields involve

neither Christians nor Muslims because ultimately you've got peoples at the Mongols who in

their early years, this from the first day invading the Middle East, their beliefs for the most part, centre on Shamanistic Central Asian practices. So yeah, it's a very complicated, but fascinating area. Yeah, and as we head now into the 1240s, I mean we all lot to hide hadn't we, because the Mongols are coming. That's a pretty scary moment for anybody. If anyone told me the Mongols were coming, I would be at the door like a shot. I wonder, I mean another unfair question for you

here. I've given you two really unfair questions to start off with, something up the Crusading period quickly. I wonder if you can kind of sum up for us who the Mongols are where they come from and how they become such significant players by the 1240s. Okay, so as I've said, this does happen from time to time and it is a feature of your Asian history that there are these sudden invasions

“out of the Central Asian step region. There can be centuries between them. But I think most people”

will have heard of say the Huns, invading the Eastern Moment Empire, our later invasions, such as the Magias, for example, or the Turks have already mentioned or indeed the Mongols. But the Mongols themselves or the Moal people, they began in what were the sort of the northern parts of the Mongolia, very much on the borderlands where the step sort of the wide grassland areas move into the coniferous forest felt of the far north. And in the origins, they may not have been

solely nomadic, a researchist of suggests that they may have actually have roots that go back to the community to live in the forest. But they're in a highly complex and very hostile landscape. There's lots of different political factions and different peoples in Mongolia as we'd call it today.

“They're all struggling for ascendancy and Genghis Khan or Chinghis Khan as he's more accurately”

known. He's born into a faction that suffered a great deal very recently and he himself is imprisoned at an early point in his life. And the story of the rise of the Mongol Empire really is very much tied to Chinghis Khan's life. I've often wondered maybe it's because of the extreme uncertainty and suffering of his childhood that really as soon as he's able to, he pushes and carries on pushing to expand and expand and expand. I wonder if there's a search for security somehow

in that. But attacking neighbouring peoples, he doesn't always win, but he wins enough. There's no

stopping him. And to eventually once you get to the early 30th century, he begins to try and expand outside Mongolia. Having conquered all the various peoples within Mongolia, he wages war into northern China. In the 12 teams of the years 12, 18, he begins his advance or begins his approach on the Middle East with an attack on what's called the Chwarazmir Empire, which controls much of, well, it's Persia that it would be modern day, Iran and many of the regions neighbouring a

step from there. He also expands into Central Asia, what we would call today, Russia, and ultimately into Eastern Europe until, of course, eventually under his airs, the Mongol Empire will stretch from the Pacific seaboard all the way across to the Euphrates river in the Middle East or, indeed, to the borders of Poland and Hungary for the North. Fantastic, thank you. You mentioned there, the Chwarazmir Turks are almost a buffer in a space in between the Mongols as they advance and

the Crusader states and the Near East. What impact does the Chwarazmir Turks have been displaced by the Mongols have? Did they sort of assault the Near East? Did people of the Near East realize that this might be a forerunner for something else? Did they just have to deal with the Turks that are in front of them at that point? Yeah, so at this point, the Crusader states are relatively

They're trying to survive more through diplomacy for the most part, interspersed with

“moments of aggression at times of major crusades. But the major, the really big power on their”

borders is the Ayubid Empire, and the Ayubid Empire is basically the Empire ruled by Saladins'

airs. And they spend much of their time fighting amongst themselves. But there is a common threat to all the empires of the Middle East, which is that the Mongols are advancing and you're right. One of the earliest signs of this advance, a kind of bow wave, almost in military terms, is the tens of thousands of people displaced by the Mongol advance. Moving west, trying to get out of the way, of course they are, as you said, if you heard the Mongols were coming,

you'd be straight out of the door that we all would. And so they're moving west, trying to get out of the way. And many of them are just moving as family groups or as small communities.

“But the Choir Asmians, in the 1230s, they move as a very, very large contingent,”

including around 10,000 warriors. So they're exceptionally powerful. And 10,000 is probably

a bit conservative. They go to the Seljuk's in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey initially, but they're forced to flee from there, and they go south into what would be in modern-day terms more than Syria. And they're desperate, they're looking for a new homeland. And the Ayubids, so, Saladin's dynasty in Egypt, offers them a new homeland. But they're not offering it for free. In exchange, they want military assistance. And they want military assistance against a

rival branch of the Ayubid dynasty in Damascus. And as a result, the Choir Asmians move south

to join forces with the Egyptian Ayubids and honorute. They besiege and sack Jerusalem.

This is 1244, and Jerusalem at this point is under Frankish, or is within the Crusader states. And after that, the Choir Asmians move south and join forces with the Ayubids on the borders of Egypt. And he is just a little around the region of Gaza at this point. Meanwhile, the arrival Ayubid faction in Damascus recognizes the threat being posed by the Choir Asmians who have substantially enhanced the rival Egyptian Ayubid faction. And so, they make an alliance with the

Crusader states, specifically the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And this goes back to what I'll say about the complexity of the landscape, because what we're looking at here is a Choir Asmian plus Ayubid alliance. Fighting, another Ayubid faction allied with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the result of this is a very large battle and place called Forbe. And the result is a catastrophic defeat for the Dama scene Ayubids with their Frankish allies. And so, for the Choir Asmians and for the Egyptians,

this is an enormous victory. After this, the Choir Asmians are essentially given the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the southernmost, and, well, least small Crusader states that surround the natives of settle the landscape, as they're able to conquer in the towns or cities, they just move into the countryside around them. And that creates a crisis. And so, messengers go back to Western Europe, meanwhile, the Ayubid Egyptians attacked Damascus, which they managed to conquer for themselves.

So, this is a period. The Mongols haven't appeared yet. There's still some way off. But nonetheless, the events they've played a part in setting in motion are reshaping the region. And that's eliciting very loud cries for help from the Crusader states going back to Western Christendom. So, we're already in a state of a bit of chaos and havoc being reaped by the Mongols, but before they've even arrived. So, it's not even then doing it at this point, but they're causing

what's going on. And as you mentioned, the result of all of this in the Near East is that in 1245 Pope innocent, the 7th cause, what we will now cook me know is the 7th Crusade. And the French King Louis IX takes control, takes the lead in this. Can you tell us a little bit about

“who Louis IX was and how he ends up being the leader of the 7th Crusade? Why did he want to do this?”

So, Louis personally is an exceptionally pious ruler even by the standards of the day. And he's also reasonably competent, but he has been worn and raised on the stories of his ancestors almost all of whom have been on Crusade. Louis VIII went on Crusade against the heretics in southern

he has this tradition plus the fact that he is himself an exceptionally pious ruler. And of course,

“Jerusalem has just been taken by the Quarazmids. So, there's a network of different factors”

one possible explanation people have also given is that he became ill and he's swore when he was ill that if he got better, then he would go on Crusade. It's possible another factor in the mix.

But it also helps that in this period, France is getting a great deal more powerful.

The wars with the angiv in empire centered in the kingdom of England, which ruled much of Western France in the 12th century. Most of those lands now have been reconquered by the kings of France. The kings of France have also extended their authority down much, going much closer to the south coast. And in fact, Louis actually builds a port for his Crusade at a morten southern France. So, France is a great deal more powerful. It's going to get a great deal more coherent

from a bureaucratic perspective going forwards a little bit after this time. So, France is going from

“strength to the strength. So, Louis' capacity to wage a crusade is also increasing.”

Having said that, Louis takes leadership of the crusade in part because he's a major crown head, but also because other people in Western Europe at this time are busy with other things. So, for example, Emperor Frederick II is busy fighting wars both in Germany and in Northern Italy. The kingdom of England is a bit of a mess at this time. With various conflicts taking place. So, really, it's France that's going to be able to do this

because it's the only one that's not entangled but other serious concerns or able to disentangle themselves from serious concerns. You do get other crusaders from other areas. You do get other monarchs who offer a degree of assistance in one form or another, but it's Louis who goes. There's lots of opportunity there in the sense that, as you mentioned, incredibly

“pious people will want to go on crusade and will view it as a kind of a duty. But there was”

also we've seen there can be rivalry between crowned heads who head off on crusade. So, friction between kings of France and Holy Roman emperors and kings of France and kings of England.

There's not always room for more than one crowned head. So, Louis is able to kind of be the main man here.

Is it true that we see the Pope talking with the idea of trying to get the Mongols to become allies against the Arabids? The Pope wants to know more. And so, in 1245, the Pope sends out a series of envoys. So, I'm going via the Middle East, some through Eastern Europe to the Mongols. Yes, the paper is absolutely interested in what can be achieved with the Mongols, but at this point, simply knowing who they are, what they want, what they're trying to achieve, how strong

are they? Why are they able to conquer so much that these basic questions haven't yet been answered. So, their fact-finding mission missions as it were, but also trying to work out, is there something that can be achieved with the Mongols, or even could they be converted, which would be another quite a big question for churchmen at this time. So, all those questions are in play. Louis is potentially interested, but he himself received a demand

from the Mongols to submit to Mongol Authority before this. And only a few years before Louis sets out, the Mongols invade Poland and Hungary, and caused enormous devastation to both countries. So, Louis is not on any illusions about the threat the Mongols posed Western Europe. But, Louis sets out on crusade with his fleet, and he arrives on Cyprus, and there are the beginnings of diplomacy with the Mongols. The Mongols sends some Eastern

Christians as their envoys to Louis on Cyprus. What an interesting dimension of Mongol diplomacy, actually. If they're approaching a Christian power, they'll often send Christians as their envoys, and they will embroider their demands or their sort of the opening offer, we have passages from the Bible. In a similar vein, when they approach a Muslim power, they'll often try to embroider their diplomacy and their diplomatic letters and things like that,

with passages from the Quran. So they're quite, it's quite interesting to see how they carry that out. But within the Mongols correspondence to Louis, it's quite striking really. In some ways, you could read them as standard demands. The Mongols should rule the world. This is what they feel that they have been granted, and therefore everyone should submit to them. And yet, as somehow within it, there is also a very strong hint. They might be open to an

alliance at the same time. And so Louis sends out Emersories to the Mongols to try and

continue those negotiations, but they never really come to anything. Not from Louis' perspective.

sat while we think about what his aims might be, because from there, he could try and reinforce

the Crusader States along the coast in the Levant. He could aim to reconco Jerusalem, or he could follow in the footsteps of the 5th Crusade and target Egypt instead.

“What do we know about what he decides to do and where he goes next?”

The whole question of how to conquer Jerusalem is exceptionally complicated. And it's a question lots of people at the time are writing about and thinking about. Because it's not simply as it's not as simple as land your army at the nearest point to Jerusalem, march to Jerusalem to siege it, conquer Jerusalem, go home. No one, or none of the sort of the reason of key strategic thinkers are suggesting that as a line of approach. And there's a very good reason for that,

which is that the standard Crusade, like Louis Crusade, if that Louis lingers longer than most, but most Crusade have won't be prepared to be away from home for more than say three, four years. So if Louis took Jerusalem, fine, he might be able to take it and then he'll go and then it

“will disappear again because it'll be conquered immediately afterwards. Because the kingdom of”

Jerusalem, what's left of it, simply isn't strong enough to defend Jerusalem in the long term and Louis knows this. In many ways, when Frederick II, she controlled over Jerusalem via diplomacy, this is a case in point as soon as the ten-year truce with the iubids expired. Jerusalem became

imperiled and was ultimately lost entirely in 1244, a mere what 15 years after Frederick arranged

for it to be included into the Crusaded States. So there is a short termism that they're trying to avoid. Yes, they can probably get Jerusalem, but how do they keep it in the long term? And you've got various leaders grappling with that question. You know, in all the way back to the third crusade, Richard I had very similar conversations with sort of experts, to detect person hospitalers, who were experts in the whole business of campaigning in the Middle East. There's got to be a

different way of doing it. And the solution a lot of people land on is Egypt. Now that might sound like a very strange thing to say, Egypt is a long way away from Jerusalem, how could that possibly be seen as a means to conquer Jerusalem? Well, the answer to that is, if you just sort of summing up a map of the Middle East, Egypt is the economic centre. It's way more valuable economically than any other area, branches of the Silk crodes from Central Asia and China passed through Egypt,

much of the spice routes trade from Southeast Asia, India, crossing the Indian Ocean, then north across the Red Sea to eastern Egypt, all that traffic or large chunk of it will then go to Egypt where the goods will be transported to the major cities or taken by canal to Alexandria and Damietta on the north coast for trans shipment into the Mediterranean trade. So Egypt is

economically crucial. So the thinking goes like this, many crusading strategists suggest

conquering Egypt first. The idea being if Egypt can be conquered with all that revenue under their control and having denied that revenue to their opponents, they can then afford to finance army big enough in the Middle East for the permanent re-establishment of control over Jerusalem. And so this is the thinking, conquer Egypt and then establish a position of Egypt and

“use those resources for permanent control over Jerusalem. And so that's what Luis after and that's”

why Luis after that. Yeah, fascinating. And I guess there's an extent to which politically as well if the Ayurbids in Egypt are largely controlling Muslim held Near Eastern, if you just rub that, then that's a way to disrupt that whole area before you go there as well as then having all of their wealth and economic power as well. And this sounds a lot like what we saw with the fifth crusade, the idea is to target Egypt and from there to move towards Jerusalem and we saw the fifth crusade

have a bit of initial success that looked really really promising and then the kind of the wheels fell off. What happened with the seventh crusade? Well, from Luis perspective, it starts to him really promising and then the wheels fall off. Oh. Okay. So yeah, there are marked similarities to the fifth crusade. So what Luis does is he marshals his forces on Cyprus and then with his

besieging Damietta, which is on the north eastern side of the Nile Delta. Now, it took the fifth crusade. I forget exactly how long it was, but it was about a year to get into Damietta. But in Luis case, this is very different. So Luis fleet gathers off the coast and then from a

amongst that fleet comes a line of long boats, bringing the first assault parties of Luis Crusade.

Now, the Ayubid army is waiting for them on the beach. Lines of archers, lines of troops

“ready to receive the attack. And so you should imagine a sort of crossfire as crossbowmen from the”

approaching boats and archers from the beach begin to exchange barrages of arrows and crossbow bolts trying to gain the upper hand. And then the crusade has jumped down from their boats and charge in towards the beach. And in the shallows, they're met with the Ayubid infantry and there's a big clash in the shallow water. And it's a significant battle, but it does ultimately turn in Luis favour. And so he gains the beach. Now, that wasn't, again, this is very, very similar to the fifth crusade.

The fifth crusade didn't have too much trouble getting onto the beach. The next question is Damayeta. And Damayeta is massively fortified. And the current assaultson of Egypt has specifically

“a refortified and resource and built up his tolerance in Damayeta. So it can resist a very long siege.”

But here's the catch. The garrison in Damayeta, a bedow in garrison, evacuates the city immediately after Luis takes the beach. And so Luis forces just walk in. So this major frontier bulwark of the Ayubid's defenses simply collapses. So for the Ayubid forces, this is terrifying and extremely concerned, they were counting on Damayeta to hold the crusade for a long time or to hold them entirely. Because of course, they know by now. The Ayubids are fully aware

that if we can hold the crusade as off for a few years, they're not going to be around forever. They're not a permanent feature on the landscape. If we can just hold them off, then they'll go away.

“So for the Ayubids, as there's so many previous commanders, playing for time is crucial.”

You've got to hold the crusades off and they will go home. But now Damayeta is full of them within a couple of days. And within that, the crusades have acquired a fully supplied base, all those munitions, and a huge part of food. So things begin to look very worrying from an Ayubid perspective. That mean while the crusades advance up the Nile south, and of course,

they're heading ultimately towards Cairo. But Damayeta is a little bit, it's a bit a little bit

like it's on an island. In it there's a main branch of the of the Nile that goes down to has which leads Damayeta to its east. And there is another smaller branch of the dot Nile, which forks a little bit further upstream, and then passes down Damayeta to the west. So to get to continue their journey towards Cairo, they have to cross that branch of the Nile. And so they reach the point with a Nile forks, and they're looking for a way across.

And I have to say, the film producer wanted to create this. It would be an epic scene because you have the crusaders on one bank of the Nile being supplied by ships coming from Damayeta. And they're trying to build an earthen causeway across this smaller branch of the Nile. On the other side of the branch, the Ayubid army has set up a line of current away trebuches, hurling lumps of rock at this causeway, trying to prevent it being built.

And meanwhile you have boats and crossbowmen and archers all trying to hamper the other side

it's an incredible sort of cross river conflict. But it's not going anywhere for the crusaders.

The Ayubids are doing quite a good job of holding the crusaders at arms length. And their main army is just a very short way further north outside a town called Mansura. So for the Ayubids, the goal is to keep the crusaders there. They can't cross the river. For the crusaders, the goal is to find a way across. But the Ayubids have another problem

this branch of the Nile where it can be forwarded. And so Louie's forces set out.

“And they find that they can indeed be forwarded. And so the Vanguard and the Louie's brother”

crosses the Nile and Louie's instructions are that once Robert of Artoa with the Vanguard is crossed the Nile, he has to wait. And then the main army will come across and join him. But Robert of Artoa has other ideas not quite clear of his Robert or the Templars who are with him who are pushing for this. But Robert sets off without waiting for the main army and leads his Vanguard around 700 heavy cavalry. In a massive cavalry charge directly into the Ayubid camp.

This takes the Ayubids utterly by surprise. Robert of Artoa's forces overrun the entire Ayubid army.

And so the Ayubid army realizing the day is lost, begin to pour in huge numbers through the gates of the nearby town of Mansura looking for the safety of that town

“and its walls. So having routed the entire Ayubid army and at the point of victory”

for the Crusaders and defeat for the Ayubids, Robert of Artoa reforms his cavalry and we're not sure who gave the advice or whether it was him himself. But he decides that what he's going to do is charge directly into Mansura with his heavy cavalry. And he does that. But heavy cavalry works well in open spaces. But in narrow roads and alleyways in a packed town filled with wagons and Ayubids sold from escape the fighting. It doesn't perform so well. And only three

of Robert of Artoa's forces ever got out of that town alive. Robert of Artoa, according to one story, did fight his way out of the town but was killed in the process of doing so. But what all of this is taking place and all this big confrontation near Mansura is playing out. And again, those misnurs who are familiar with the Fifth Crusade will recognise another parallel here. There's another dimension to the conflict which is beginning to emerge which is that the Ayubids have got

ships onto the main branch of the Nile. And they're using those ships to cut the supply lines bringing ships down to the Crusader Camp near Mansura. And so the Crusaders begin to starve. They're not getting enough food. And eventually, they're getting nowhere against the Ayubid army. They're running out of food and the decision is made to withdraw. So Luis army begins to pull back that withdraws as far as it can. But this point sickness is spreading rapidly in the Crusading army.

And eventually, they become surrounded and are forced to surrender. And Luis himself is taken prisoner. So this is a massive defeat for the 7th Crusade. But as we shall see, this is also not necessarily

“good news for the Ayubids. I think that's what we're up to bringing as well. The Ayubids themselves”

are in a bit of a mess in Egypt. They're facing their own problems. We've got the emergence of the Mamlooks. And I guess we'll talk a bit about who the Mamlooks are and how they come to be real power players during this period as well. Now the Ayubids, just like so many dynastys across the Middle

East, they are accustomed to deploying Mamlook forces. The Mamlook forces are basically people

who have been purchased by a ruler or a ruling elite as enslaved people. And then converted to Islam and trained as elite warriors. Lots of dynasties do this across the Middle East. It's standard practice. But the Ayubids have particularly done it. And one of the reasons for this is as the Mamlooks advanced across what today would be Russia and Eastern Europe far to the north. They seized tens of thousands of people who they then sold into the Mediterranean trade as

enslaved people via ports in the Crimea. Now all of that meant that enslaved people could be purchased at a very low price and say the Ayubids by them in large numbers. And so the Mamlook regiments get bigger and bigger. But there's a problem which I'm guessing that many people would be picking up on now which is that there's only a limit. How large you can make these forces before they start to realize that they've got serious leverage on their own account. But the

Sultan's got another problem which is that he's seriously ill. And he's I think by this point he's

raises a crisis of leadership because his son and heir to Iran's Shah is in northern Syria.

He and his father don't get on. And so it's not as simple as the Sultan's calling for his son and heir to come and take over. He doesn't call for him. And the Sultan dies. So suddenly Ayubid Egypt is legalists. So what happens next? And this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the history of this particular crusade which is that it's his wife, Shah Al-Dur, who steps in and says, "Oh yeah, my husband's alive. He's just in his bed. He's a bit ill." But he's issued these orders.

And so she begins to hand out orders. He's working with some of the senior army commanders who

“know what's going on. But they keep the Sultan's death as secret. And she begins to issue orders”

in his name. And what she's trying to do is to hold things together. Because she knows that as soon as news gets out of the Sultan's dead, there'll be chaos unless and there isn't air in place. And so she sends out invoice pretty quickly to get Turan Shah south into Egypt to come and take charge of the situation. Yeah, but it's around about now that a figure emerges Baybars who will be a really key figure in the Mamluk faction. So who is Baybars what we know about him? How does he become

quite so important? Yeah, Baybars began his career as rather as I said, really, as an enslaved person taking captive on the its thoughts on near the shores of the Black Sea, sold into slavery,

“he was sort of passed from one rudders to another for a while and ended up in service to the”

Ayubis like so many people. So Sultan Baybars will rise to become a major power but at this point, the former Ayubid Sultan's heir to Iran Shah arrives takes power for himself and it seems as though things will continue much as they ever had. The Ayubids of Ittorias, the Crusaders are defeated and surrendered. Louis is a prisoner of the Ayubids. Everything's going the Ayubids way, but the new Sultan alienates the Mamluks. The Mamluks feel as if they haven't received their due from the victory.

And so now legend reports it was Baybars, but the Mamluks ultimately seized Turan Shah and then

murdered him on the banks of the Nile. Now immediately after that, there is the question of who's going to rule next and essentially this is the process by which the Mamluks rise to power. And through a series of different rulers, they assert themselves as rulers of Egypt. In the early days, they normal set up an Ayubid puppet so someone they can claim is the Ayubids Sultan, but in fact they're running Egypt themselves, but after a few years, they simply just assert

themselves as Egypt's rulers independent. So the seventh Crusade is a catastrophe for the Crusaders. It is also a catastrophe for the Ayubids. It is also the rise of a new empire that will survive until the early 16th century when it's conquered by the Ottomans, which is the rise of the Mamluk Empire.

“And one of the most crucial things we see during this early Mamluk period is kind of in around”

1260. We see them come into conflict with the Mongols. And this seems to be a fairly seismic clash that could well have determined the direction, the rulership of this whole region for years to come because suddenly the unstoppable Mongols find someone who stops them. Yes, so of course all these events with Louise Crusade are not taking place in a vacuum. Events are changing in the wide world, but least of that Louise sent Amissaries himself

to go and negotiate with the Mongols as we come to anything. The Mongols are moving forwards and huge numbers of displaced people are moving in front of them. So there is a new great Khan called Monka and Monka sends his brother Hulugu to the Middle East with the goal of, I suspect that the real goal was to conquer everything that's left, anything that's still independent. And there's not much the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad,

which is basically Baghdad and the few surrounding towns, is still independent.

and in 1256, he enters the Middle East and soon after this, he advances on Baghdad.

“Now Baghdad is one of the largest cities in the world at this time and the Mongols surround”

the city, they lay siege and then ultimately they conquer the city with enormous loss of life

and enormous massacre of the population, which of course for the inhabitants and in specifically for Sunni Islam and the Abbasid Caliphate, this is an enormous tragedy, this is a major disaster, not to mention that the casualties will have been in something in the region of six figures. So we're talking about a very, very significant and bloody event. After this, the Mongols then head north into Syria and they conquer the northern Syria and city of Aleppo, which isn't

Ayubid city and then immediately after that the Ayubids in Damascus evacuate Damascus because they

“can see this isn't going to work and ultimately a Mongol flying column picks up the Ayubids”

Sultan in Damascus, of course the Ayubids in Syria, they still survive the seventh crisis, it's only Egypt is conquered by the Mamluks but the Mongols conquer what's left of them in 1260. So the only independent powers now are the Crusader states and the Mamluks in Egypt and the Crusader states are very much veering towards allying with them or submitting to the Mongols. After civil war, regicide and cromwells were public, the monarchy returned, but Britain

would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanne Lipskim and this month or not just the tutors

were transported back to the age of restoration royalty from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors from history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The Crusader states are in such a poor situation now that they must have been looking at the Mongols and they can't resist these guys if they come but maybe we could just point them at the Mamluks instead? Absolutely, the Mongols are unstoppable, who argues army has been

estimated at the lower end estimates put it at about 100,000 troops. On a good day, the Crusader states the kingdom of Jerusalem can manage about 10,000 so there is going no stopping the Mongols with the Crusader states and the prince's power of Antioch submits early to the Mongols. Kingdom of Jerusalem opens negotiations with the Mongols, doesn't quite submit but it's a sound out what can be achieved there. And then the Mamluks do something rather unexpected.

And that is that more or less anyone anywhere in Eurasia, under threat of invasion by the Mongols, if they've decided to fight and not to submit, what they will do generally is to pair their defenses and wait to be attacked. But the Mamluks don't do that. They march out beyond Egypt and assertively seek combat with the Mongols, which is an incredibly gutsy thing to do. And they know by this state that there's no alternative for them because they made it very

clear what they're going to do because they're short while before this. The Mongols sent envoys to the Mamluks and the Mamluks killed all but one of the envoys and shaved the beard from

the third. There is no other way this is going to result now, except on the battlefield.

So the Mamluks march out with an army of around 12,000 against a Mongol force of 100,000

“seeking battle. And that we have reports of Mamluk commanders save. Why are we doing this?”

This isn't going to work but no. The Mamluk Sultan who at this point is called Chetuz, he's determined he's going to do this. And the Mamluks reach out to the kingdom of Jerusalem and say do you want to fight with us? Just again another example that the battle lines are rather more complicated than the Middle East no often presented. And the kingdom of Jerusalem hedges its beds. It doesn't want to fight the Mongols, so it doesn't want to fight with the Mamluks. But it provides

food and sells horses to the Mamluks. I presume so that in the unlikely event of a Mamluk victory,

because they were we didn't help them. So there's a degree of sort of diplomacy going on there.

“But events work out very well for the Mamluks because the Great Khan who reduced brother”

Monka dies. And so Hulugu unexpectedly withdraws with the greater part of his army, eastwards, because he wants to be involved in the political fallout from the Great Khan's death.

And he only leaves the garrison in Syria to hold the territory. They've never been attacked.

No one attacks the Mongols. The Mongols are attacking everyone. They are not attacked to themselves. Except they are because the Mamluks are on the adverse. And the Mamluks meet this garrison at a back-al-called "ine-jallot", which is a surprise victory for the Mamluks. And immediately after that, the Mamluks take Damascus and Aleppo who have more than happy to hand themselves over to the Mamluks because they've been under Mongol rule. And so the Mamluks look like saviors to them.

Suddenly, the Mongols have been defeated. But it's just a garrison. The main field army hasn't been defeated, and of course, as soon as Hulugu learns what's happened. His way is going to have his revenge as soon as he possibly can. I often wonder what would happen if the Mongols didn't have this situation where they withdraw everything and go back to the centre when there's a succession going on. Because it kind of brings

to a whole everything that they've managed to achieve until then. And it feels like a slightly bizarre situation. But obviously, the Mamluks here have absolutely exploited the fortune that they found in front of them. And they've managed to beat the Mongols, which even if it's just a garrison, people don't do. Originally, this is a big propaganda victory for the Mamluks too. Are they then

“able to assert themselves more widely in the region? What does this mean for the Crusader states now?”

So the main thing that helps the Mamluks is that in the years, after Imjul at all, though the Mongols have sworn revenge immediately, the Mongol empires in the process of breaking up into different sections ruled by different branches of the imperial family. And in the Middle East, Hulugu's territories that become known as the Il Khanate. They are also claimed by a rival branch of the family, which is become known as the Khanate of the Golden Horde, further north

in Russia, Eastern Europe, that sort of region. And they go to war. And it's a disastrous war fought across the Caucasus mountains, which involves massive casualties for both sides. And that gives the Mamluks about 20 years, with which to rebuild, to build themselves up, expand their trade, expand their army and fortify the Euphrates River. They even send out teams of burners to burn grassland, to prevent the Mongol armies from grazing their horses there. But that 20 year period

gives the Mamluks time to ready their defenses. So the Mongols do ultimately reinvade into

1281. No one's ready for a Mongol invasion, but there is ready as they can be. And that means that there's another big battle fought. And one historian says that the Mongol battle I was 26 kilometers wide. This is vast scale warmaking. But the Mamluks defeat them. Again, and in many ways, this is a more significant battle than I am Jalot, because I'm meeting the Mongols at full strength. And despite the disparity in numbers, the Mamluks defeat them,

the Mongols are put to flight again. And the Mongols won't return in force to that theater of war

“for another 18 years. And it's a crucial point that in those gaps, so between I'm Jalot and”

Homs, 21 years, Homs and the Mongols returned in 1299, 18 years. The Mamluks spend those intervening years taking apart the Crusader states. And this doesn't take place in some kind of epic show down or massive battle as hard any battles at all. Because the Crusader states realize that they are vastly outnumbered by the Mamluks. And so town by town, city by city, stronghold by stronghold,

the Mamluks take the Crusader states apart in a series of campaigns that ultimately sees the collapse

of the mainland, Crusader states in 1291. And it's interesting, isn't it, that after almost 200 years of the Crusader states being there. And of Christians having a presence in the Near East and these fluctuating periods of conflict in Crusades, that it's not some seismic battle that ends it all. It's a slow dismantling of what the Christians had and them being forced out. And we don't see, again, we don't see at this point a big crusading zeal in Europe,

do we? Have the European Christians simply lost their interest? Are they not believe it's

Jerusalem? Yeah, so there's a number of factors. There are a lot of calls for a major crusade, particularly in the 1270s under the pontificates of Gregory the 10th. But it doesn't really happen.

“Gregory the 10th dies at a crucial moment, which causes those plans to collapse. But there's also”

a lot of other wars going on in Western Europe, people are preoccupied with other major conflicts as a conflict that are Sicily, England's fighting various civil wars. There's wars elsewhere. It's just, it's just not a propitious environment in which to create a new crusade. And indeed, there'll be no big crusade, really, to the Middle East. Despite major calls for crusades, and it's really big army to set off for the Middle East is over a hundred years later in

1396. So it never really happens. And it's that ongoing inner fighting and the internal sort

of disputes of Western Christendom's leaders at play a major part in that. I just find it say fascinating that it all begins in this big explosion of the first crusade. And in the end, 200 years later, it's effectively really just a petering out. It kind of just, I don't know,

“crumbles is picked apart by the the man looks, but crumbles and goes away. And there simply isn't”

any more crusade of states and no more Christian crusading in the Holy Land really. It's a weird kind of, from all of that early activity and what the Christians must have believed was a promise that they were going to hold the Holy Land for Christianity. They've just sort of given up 200 years later and they realise they either can't do it or they just isn't the will to do it at all. The world's very much changing. There's no shortage of armchair strategists. If at there's

a real sort of, there's a whole genre of texts that are created after 1291, where people white, if he raised an army here, and we marched there and they did this, then it could be, the Crusades said it could be reconstructed. There's lots of that kind of thinking. But no, there's no major crusade and of course, in the 40th century, there are other things that will make it even more difficult, things like the great famine early on, later on the black death,

among other things. Not to mention the ongoing persistent churn of conflicts. The 100 years war kicks off between England and France, and it becomes adverse weather for crusading in that area.

It's quite a lot of enthusiasm for it, but it never really takes off after that. No major crusade

reaches the actual Holy Land region again. So thank you very much, Nick. And if people want to find out more, where can they find some of your work? Okay, yeah. So I've written a book about this whole era of history called The Mongol Storm, which is basically a history of the Middle East. In the 13th century, told from about 10 different cultural perspectives. If you're interested, I've also just finished another book which is coming out in June called The Crusader Storm,

which is a similar job for the 12th centuries, which is a history of the Crusades and the Middle East in the 12th century, again, told from around 10 different cultural perspectives. Trying to give a rounded view to events, and trying to show how the Crusades fitted in the no monks, everything else that's going on in this era. Brilliant, that's something to look forward to. Mongol Storm is absolutely incredible. So I'm very much looking forward to the Crusade

Storm to a company. Now listen us, don't go away. This episode isn't quite finished. We've charted the steady decline of the Crusader states in the face of terrifying Mongol incursions and a rampant mammalic empire, but Crusading didn't stop there in 1291 with the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem. It affects, we've felt all across the medieval world and beyond for centuries to come, whilst its legacies remained contested to this very day. So to end this epic series,

explore what we've learned and unpack what the Crusades left behind and delighted to be

joining by. Hello there. Hello there. Hello there. Thanks for having me. You are always welcome.

So I guess if we're going to think about the legacies of Crusades. So what we can see there is

“that all winds right down in, well, about 1291. I think it would that be very interesting. I think”

I mean we've got kind of the eight numbered Crusades. We need to throw in all the other bits and pieces that are going on in the mix with all of that. But kind of by 1291, there isn't an army that physically goes. But that's different to the desire of particularly the papacy. We see them continue to preach Crusades for centuries after 1291. For the whole of the 14th century, they would love a Crusade to head to the Holy Land again. But it just becomes more and more difficult to make

that happen for a number of reasons. You can't help wondering, in amongst the many, many reasons,

a real like fool me twice, shame on you. Sort of a thing happened for eight times. Wow, I really

should have learned something by now. And this is the thing is people do, right? People do. And eventually you are going to figure out that it doesn't seem like God is as committed to this,

“as I am, you know, in my heart. And also, you know, really what's in it for the King's in question?”

Because we've already seen how difficult it is to hold any land over there. So it's just going to be a time-suck, a money-suck, especially by the time you get to the 14th century like babes. I can't even feed my own people. How am I ever going to get over to the Holy Land? Then you have the black death. And how are you ever going to come up with enough people to move over there? It's like we are barely keeping the farms going right now. So there are going to be a lot of social pressures

on this concept as well. But you know, as you say, yeah, turns out these guys are kind of smart. We thought when we talked about the causes of a crusade, a bit about the climatic factors that are going on in the medieval warm period, we get to the end of the 13th century. That's also ending. And we're moving towards the little ice age. So we've got the 14th century of catastrophe is that you talked about the great famine, the black death. But also there isn't that sense of comfort

and abundance in Europe that there once was, which helped to feed the crusade. So for the crusading movement, some of its, some of its fodder has gone. The things that it's been living off for a

“couple of centuries are starting to vanish. And I think one of the big things that's starting to”

vanish as well at this point in time are these specific crusading orders. I think this is an important point to get at because trouble with, you know, attempting to maintain the Holy Land is, wow, these guys got real retcha. And that is something that kings take note of. And they exploit

right. Like, this is one of the big things. Like, it's one thing if you or Richard the first,

and you can say, well, how do you maintain things like that when there's like the Templars going, hello, where are the Templars? And everyone has, oh, I'm just giving money to the Templars right now, like why would I, why would I give it to the king? Right? But then also that introduces, I think, kings eyeing people like the Templars up when you have these incredibly wealthy groups of individuals. Who, again, aren't even really able to do their jobs, right? I think they've been spectacularly

successful. They've created what we would probably call today a multinational company, you know, they're almost like a medieval Amazon. They are everywhere and they will deliver to your door if you give them money for it. They are creating banking systems across Western Europe. They are controlling money and the movement of funds. They are in the ear of monarchs and nobles across Europe.

In a way that the Templar order was never designed to be. And as you say, people are looking at

them and you, I think people like fill it the fourth in France. He wants them money. And then this is the thing, right? They've been pushed out of the Holy Land. Here they are, like, in, in Cyprus. Here they are kind of like a falling back into Tripoli further and further again. And is it true that they aren't really doing the thing that they want? Yes. But it's also true that if you are filled up and you start buying them up and you take everything away from them, then

you're not going to be able to count on their largest on their supply lines later on if you decide to go over to the Holy Land. Yeah. And I think their kind of failure in their fall is in pretty stark contrast to the way that the hospital is managed to come out of the crusading era because they don't necessarily go down that route of becoming this banking group. They're not this multinational corporation that are in European countries getting involved in politics and stuff there.

They managed to position themselves much more as almost a frontier of, of Christendom. And that seems to serve them that they're saying we will hold this line. And I think that that is really canny, right? Because if what we're saying is, yeah, the Sarlads looks like the Holy Land's bit of a non-starter, what you can do is at least say, well, we are the line, right? We are the wall that is holding back the theoretical hordes of Gorg and Megog, right? Where the Templars are falling

back to Cyprus, the hospitals are falling back to roads until they get pushed out of there by the Ottomans in the 16th century. And then they'll fall back to Malta. And, you know, they'll be on Malta till Napoleon gets rid of them at the end of the 18th century, which is God bless them. It's a good

“line. It's a good right. And it's a weird flex from Napoleon. Wait, why are you feeling that you need to”

demolish the hospitals? After Civil War, Regicide and Cromwells Republic, the monarchy returned,

the tutors, where transported back to the age of restoration royalty from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on not just the tutors from history hit, wherever you get your podcastes. But they seem to manage to do what the Templars couldn't do, whether the

“Templars have got overconfident, forgotten what they're about. I don't know, but like I say, I think”

the hospitalists do this really interesting thing of saying we will maintain this front line and just leave us a lot. But I mean, speaking of this front line, that they are maintaining big part of what they're arguing they're maintaining is a line against our good friends, the Ottomans. And it is true that at this point in time, we've had the Seljuk Turks before. This is like two Turk, two furious, we got Ottomans now, and they will go on to be like the major power in Asia

Minor for quite some time. It's quite striking how close that mirrors the events leading up to the

first crusade in that you've got this sudden Turk threat on the edges of Christendom that forces

them to become mobilized. It's not Alexios appealing from Byzantium anymore, but it's that same sort of notion that at the end of the the 14th century, a hundred years after we've said we think crusading has really ended. There is what 15,000 men who march out to try and fight against the Ottomans, they don't do a very good job with them. They do it, yeah, does not go well. And yet for some reason, that's not, it's not called the crusade. It's not numbered as a crusade. We don't think of it as

a continuation of the crusading period. I don't know whether at this point are we much more openly

“acknowledging that this is far more to do with land and territory than it is to do with religion?”

I think that is a big part of it, right, because it's not as though we aren't going to see a bunch of crusades happening at the same time that are largely European, you know, because listen, go ask the tutonic nights what they're doing up in the Baltic right now, and they'll say, oh, that's crusade. And you can still see, I think, the Roman church in its arrogance and its conviction of its own superiority and correctness. You know, when Tamalayan emerges to try and rebuild

the Mongol empire, he stops the Ottomans in their tracks, and it looks for a little while, like the Mongols are back in their Chinkis Khan kind of way. Oh, yeah. And what does Rome do? They preach a crusade against Tamalayan. Which good luck. I mean, I swear to God, like, yeah, hearing all the stories about like the piles of skulls as thrones, and they're like,

“yeah, guys, I think we really stand a chance. It should be absolutely fine. Yeah. Yeah.”

But, and you do still see crusading rhetoric, you know, carrying on it into the early modern period, because the Ottomans are now on the borders of the Habsburg lands. But again, crusading rhetoric is used. People are willing to pull it out of the draw when they want money, because it's crusading tax. Give us loads of money and we'll go and fight the Ottomans who

were about to breach our borders and head into your lands. But it never, ever works still,

does it? And again, are we stuck with this idea that this is no longer about this isn't Rome, this isn't Western Christendom's over in France worried about what's happening thousands of miles away. We're seeing Habsburgs being concerned that their Ottomans neighbors might be about to take their land, and everybody is thinking, I know what you're doing. Well, and of course they do, right? You said it yourself. These French people aren't like, oh, what's going on thousands of miles away.

French people are like, ha ha, stick it to the Habsburgs. I mean, France is the first of France. It's one of the first to be like, nah, I'm in it with them, right? Which would be unthinkable. I see, if you went back a few hundred years and you explained that France would side with the Ottoman Earth against the rest of Western Christendom and Eastern Christendom, people would be utterly confused. I would, would France have even existed, would they have allowed France as a country to

exist if it had been doing that to, it's a bizarre situation that completely undermines the idea that any of this is crusading because you've got the most Christian King. So we've been talking about Western Christian efforts to retake the Near East, the Holy Land, the Eastern Mediterranean. And even if all of that ends in 1291, then crusading elsewhere, the idea of fighting people who's really just beliefs aren't the same as yours in principle does continue in other places.

Yeah, I mean, I think probably first off the top of our heads, we could talk about what's going on

on the Iberian Peninsula, for example. And granted, you know, we've done in numerical episodes

It's not like, oh, it's Christians versus Muslims, it's Muslims versus Christian. Who knows

“who's controlling a story, I said any given moment, who's controlling Redada, who's to say, right?”

But we do eventually have the situation by the time we get to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, where fundamentally the last Muslim kingdoms are destroyed, was there a bunch of back and forth? Yes. And now we often call this the Reconquista, I don't like to call it the Reconquista, because Frank okay, I'm up with that. And I don't like fascists, but fundamentally this is kind of a situation where in Christians did eventually say, look, I don't need to go all the way,

like, you know, it's the little joke, you know, we've got Muslims at home, you know, like if we're not going all the way to the Middle East in order to fight them, we can do it right

here, you know. And this does culminate in a pretty big success on Ferdinand and Isabella's part.

Do I think that they were bad people? Yes. Do I like the Spanish inquisition? No. But it is like one of those big, that's an early modern success story, baby. Like, you know, you create a huge kingdom out of what had been 10 medieval kingdoms before. And you say, and now also because we control it, we can also enforce what the religion is. And imagine telling a medieval person, oh, yeah, yeah, there's only one one state on the Iberian peninsula and also

they control what the religion is. You know, people would be shocked by that in the medieval period. The idea that such a huge amount of land could be under control of one dynasty and that you could actually get rid of all of the Jewish and Muslim people. It just wouldn't come you. Yeah. And the the Iberian peninsula is something that, you know, the amyads arrive in the south of Iberia in the eight century, pretty successful there for a couple of centuries

till they begin to fall apart. And again, it's kind of this fracturing of the internal Muslim world that begins to allow the Christians back in. And so it also overlaps the end of what we've defined as a crusading period in the terms of the Near East by a couple of centuries.

“And I think it is interesting that we see posts being aware of that and quite often trying to stop”

everybody going to the holy land because there is also a fight to be had over here. So posts are willing to say, if you can't go to the holy land here's, you know, a shortcut alternative, you know, you can use Santiago de Compostela as Jerusalem kind of thing because I think they're conscious that if you evacuate every night from Western Christom and off the Iberian peninsula, there is another frontier there that they're having to deal with. And it's significant. I think that

begins a couple of centuries before the crusading era and it lasts a couple of centuries longer than the crusading era. It's a much more long-term effort. And maybe more of an existential threat because this is on what is considered European territory than the crusades, which almost makes it odd that popes are willing to look east rather than focusing all of their efforts here first. In crusading terms, it's a success story. As from a Christian point of view, Iberia is a success

story in the way that the Near East never ever is. And in some ways the success there kind of

spawns this early modern continuation of crusading ideals when we get to the age of exploration because you think of people like Columbus and Cortes going out there, part of what they're obsessed with doing is crystallizing everybody that they meet. Yeah, absolutely. And that is specifically

“something that they are charged with doing. So we have to remember that this kind of push out”

west out across the oceans to push down into Africa, the beginnings of this push for the wholesale channel slavery of Africans. It is all driven by this idea of christianizing. They don't say that there are no worlds left to conquer. They just say, "Oh, well, we did it here. Where are we going to go to next? How far do I need to go in a boat?" In order to continue doing a version of Holy War, a version of violence against people in order to christianize them. And the papacy is very clear

in the early modern period about all of this. These are things that are completely acceptable under the doctrines of Holy War. And that is something that I think medieval christians would recognize a little bit more even if they would be kind of confused by the idea of this being a crusade. I think. And you do see Columbus in particular, some of the letters that he's writing, he's talking about all of the wealth that I'm finding, plow that into an effort to go back and take Jerusalem. So

that dream still hasn't gone. And to some extent, you wonder whether that's again flush with success on the Iberian Peninsula, they're believing we could spearhead a new crusade. So the idea of taking back Jerusalem for christianity hasn't gone away. And Columbus is perhaps envisaging these explorations to the new world and the gold and the silver that he's finding and everything else.

never leads to a numbered crusade that will actually assault Jerusalem. And certainly it is going to

“be at the very least romantic gesture, I think, across the period. I mean, can we talk a little bit”

about the Baltic Crusades? Oh, how can we not talk about the Baltic Crusades? I love a little part of it. Because we're going to get another crusading order up there. So the the tutonic knights, again, much to be talked about the hospital is they far outlive the crusading period in the way that the Templars don't manage to do. And that seems to be largely because they extricate themselves from the Holyland completely, aware the hospital is saying we will be the frontier of christendom

in the eastern Mediterranean, the tutonic knights seem much happier to say. And we'll be the frontier up in the far northeast because there's some pagan still here. And we can keep them at bay and also you know, we'll we'll push in and we'll christianize them and by the way, we might create a tutonic state and get a kingdom out of all of this as well. But we'll get a christianization. This is an interesting one because if we say that the Knights Templar are essentially a corporation

Wow, the tutonic knights, like they are doing it big, you know, down to the fact that all of their castles look the same and are made out of bricks, like they have franchises, right? This is like the McDonald's, the crusading order, you know, you see one, you know what it looks like, yep, those are two tutonic knights. And they are inching their way up into the Baltic states. And listen, there is a lot of money to be made up there. Really, really good for trappings. And

yeah, to be fair, if like what Holy War is for is christianizing people, but these are not even people of the book. These are not even Abrahamic people. They're not here, worship and fire.

“All right, here, worship and the snake, I don't know, which to be fair, I think is insanely cool.”

I think that there should be more fire worship. It's a shame that they actually got their weight, but they're making some good points, right? This really does count as a group of people who are honest to God pagans. And you can see in the early 13th century that poops are backing and sanctioning what is going on up there and they're encouraging people to go against the the pagan barbarians in the Baltics. As the crusading effort in the Near East is faltering and becoming really problematic,

because they're clearly recognizing that what the tutonic knights are giving us up there is a bit of a success story in amongst the mess that's happening in the Near East. And you get the Baltic crusades and around the tutonic knights become a bit of a magnet for people who don't make it to the Holy Land. So yeah, Henry Bollingbrook, the future Henry IV of England, goes and cuts his teeth fighting with the tutonic knights. He goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he's not there in a military

capacity. He does his fighting and he earns a reputation for himself up in the Baltics with the tutonic knights. And so presumably he's bringing back to England stories of this frontier, but the glorious work that is being done there, that only fuels this idea that it needs to continue.

“Well, fundamentally, like what if you're just not a hot weather person?”

That could have been a way to go on a holy war. It's a lot nearby. You don't have to go and be getting sunstroke all the time. That is a frontier that exists that you can go and involve yourself with.

And ultimately the the tutonic knights, kind of by the 16th century, almost become a victim of their own

success in that they have christianised all the pagans that are left there and are just running a kingdom now and they look an awful lot like a secular power, and other secular powers around them are thinking hang on. That line could be mine. Wait a minute, how do you do this? And I mean, that they will be a victim of their own success in that way. You know, where it's like well, what is the point of view? Right? It's the same thing that happens to the Knights Templar.

When you run out of pagans, when eventually we do have this decline in the Baltic states of the old pagan religions and suddenly you've just got all of these brick castles around. What's the point of that, you know? And I think as the medieval period goes on as well, one of the, maybe the most insidious developments and the one that urban might actually frown on the most is this idea of having crusades against other christians within Europe. So we have arguably one of our worst

popes is frowning this up and that is innocent the third. And now listen, medieval historians,

we go back and forth on this because on the one hand, innocent the third, he is responsible for this huge transformation of the church into a legal structure. But what does he do in order to celebrate? He goes in points that legal structure at the wrong kind of christian, which in this case are the good men and women of language, right? They use the church use the term cathar and in particular Bernard of Claire Vogue who goes out there to do some like inquisition work,

a cool guy, right? And what ends up happening is that they just find a bunch of people who are kind of like chilling out in the south of France and they've just got, you know, their own ideas about how things look. And that can mean, yes, that they perhaps believe in a dualistic idea of the universe. So there's this idea that the physical world is created by Satan, God's only created the spiritual. There are no doubts some people who believe in that at the time. There are also

people like Beatrice of Plainsville who appears to have wanted to shag a bit. And so starts calling

“herself a heretic because that's what all the guys were hitting on her say that she should do if she”

wants to do that, right? So it's a real mixed bag of people and the church goes in an absolutely massacris them. We had a really interesting episode. I've got medieval, probably a couple of years ago now we talked to Mark Gregory Pegger about the idea that the cathars didn't even exist. Then they weren't these heretics that were lurking in the caves of the long dock and holding themselves up in

fortresses. That this was never really a religious crusade. What this was a land grab because

the area that that used to be equity around the long dock was still kind of considered itself far too independent. We're still bucking against the control from Paris that the French kings wanted. The Pope is so in the pocket of the French kings by this point French popes and French kings thinking we want to unify France. What's the best way to reduce these people and force them to behave? We call them heretics and we call a crusade against them.

“But that maybe there was never any religious justification to that. What this was was a political”

manoeuvre to solidify the state of France. Indeed, if you look at who's leading it, because here we've got a Simon de Montfort. He is casting his eyes around and he is noticing Raymond of Toulouse's territory. It's looking pretty good. It's looking pretty good. Let's be so honest and

for real about that. He's like Toulouse has always been a trick you want us to control those access

over the Alps to Italy. Really important trade route and access to the coast. All these kinds of things that are politically important but actually have nothing to do with religion. Exactly. Who doesn't want to control that? Oh, come on, South of France. I'm trying to take it over right now. That's absolutely fine. He's got this in because we're already saying, oh gosh, wow, it really looks like these guys are the spawn of the devil. Off he pops. He's essentially

just annexes this entire territory by 1215. He's got the crown of Toulouse essentially. It's like, what are you talking about? This is an incredible amount of territory to suddenly take over about a four-year period. It's massively wealthy. Things just grow down in the South of France. You know, your peasants are living real good and nice. To the point that you can terrorize a bunch of them, massacre them all and they're still going to be enough people to bring the harvest in.

“And essentially, that's what Simon is able to do here. Because Simon is swearing”

filthy to the king of France for this territory that he's now taken and the French king is thinking, right, job done, that's under my control. And they've kind of boxed it up and put a bow on it and called it a crusade. It's an interesting legacy that people are still processing things in terms of crusading that we can position this as a way to do it or I need to emulate these things. And if there isn't a crusade in town, I'm going to have to find something and call it a crusade or try and

make it a crusade. Oh, yeah. And listen, there's going to be a few of those, right? So for example, the papacy is constantly doing it against our homeboy, Frederick II and all of his, you know, descended as well. And there were good reasons for this. I mean, they are controlling a lot of territory around the papal states. The papal states don't love being sandwiched between the Holy Roman Empire and some more Holy Roman Empire. That's usually not something that they have to deal with.

And so basically any time one of Frederick VII's grandsons gets a little out of control. They're like,

oh, that's crazy. Guess what? It's a crusade. Especially after the success with the albergine scene crusade, you know? Yeah. And we talked a bit when we thought about the causes of the crusade about this idea of the church wanting to reposition itself and refocus its secular authority. And you can almost still see that happening. They're still in this dispute with the Holy Roman Emperor is about who is the real secular power. And that fight is still going on and the church is

still willing to frame that as a crusade. Even though you're now talking about the Holy Roman Emperor, you know, the Christian Emperor of the former Roman Empire, we can have a crusade against him now. Because he's, and it's almost like it's, it's become an overused tool for poops to say, I don't like you crusade. Like I'm growing up, bro. Like that is, that is not, that is not a reason to call a crusade. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Like you're just throwing that term around now.

And I think another aspect of maybe the legacies of the crusade that we should think about

is the formation of some of the institutions and the structures that will become Western states that are recognizable to us today. You know, you think of Richard the Lionheart, famously didn't care about England, just used it to raise money. But there's a reason that he's able to do that because the structures are being created to allow something like the solid entice to be put in place. He has the administration that can go out and collect a tent of what everybody has.

And that's important because he needs it for the crusade, Louis the Nights when he doesn't do very well. But he understands his failure in terms of his own sin and the sin of his kingdom. So he comes home with this reforming zeal to redesign and restructure France to drive out corruption and to create this much more centralized state. So almost the legacy of the crusades is the institutionalisation, the increase centralisation of authority in states that will become

what we recognise in Europe today, England, France, Germany. I mean, I would also say Venice, for me Venice is like one of the real legacies of the crusade. And the fact that they are able to get enough money and power together that they have their own empire, right? And that is pretty much down to the crusades. And the fact that everyone is specifically going through Venice, they're looking to Venice to build ships for them. They are looking to Venice to provide

“instruments of credit, which is one of the only ways kind of around the idea that you should”

be charging interest. Venice is like, oh, but what a oh, but I'm just a little guy with a ship and the church is like, oh, yeah, what's it for? Oh, it's for the crusades. Okay, you got to find. Fine. I guess that you are allowed to charge interest. And so this really is going to set them up as

an incredible power into well into the early modern period. And you know, also I would argue to

is certain extent that is the model that the Templars are using. A bit is this finishing thing like how are you getting to in front places? You're going to need a banking system that is going to lend you credit. You are going to need to think about how your travel plans work. So I think certainly that the Templars are a really important part of the crusades. I don't necessarily mean as crusaders, but I mean as an institution within Europe. And I guess one of the other places we need to think about

the legacy of the crusades is what was Byzantium. The first crusade is kicked off in no small part because the Byzantine Empire calls for help from other Western Christians. And they very

cynically never deliver that. They go off and do something very different. We've seen the forth crusades

sat on Santa Noble. And ultimately I want does the crusading period weaken the Byzantine Empire.

“By failing to support it, does it weaken it sufficiently that the Ottomans are then able to take it?”

I would say yes. Thank you. Next, I'm going to my time tag. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're really on to something here because ultimately what is Byzantium for? If it isn't actually, you know, one of the big hallmarks of Christendom is that it isn't this important outpost of Romanness and Christianity. If not even other Christians respect that, then that takes away a lot of the shine. And it lessons their ability to argue for themselves, I think, as a polity. Yeah, because they're

concerned about fighting on their Eastern Front. And initially the Seljuk Turks, but then they will also face threats from a more cohesive Muslim presence in the Near East. And then the Mongols will arrive as well. But they don't only have to worry about that on their Eastern Front, because not only they're not getting the support, they really want from Western Christendom, but Western Christendom is actually eyeing them. You know, who breaches the walls of Constantinople

that are unbreachable, it's Western Christians. It is not a Muslim army that gets through those walls.

“It's Latin Christians. I think that one of the big things that does happen with Latin Christians”

if what we're thinking about as legacy of Crusades is they do become a bit more aware of what is going on certainly in Central Asia. You know, suddenly Mongols are not just like a theoretical something that is happening out near India, right? And a graduate, that's because some of them show up in Hungary, etc. But you know, also the idea that there can be these diplomacies, there is this idea of, oh, there are knock-on effects when Mongols move around,

then other people move around. Oh, what's a Mamluk? You know, these become things that people are really aware of in Europe. And so you do get an interesting interplay of cultural exchanges as a result of that. And I think cultural exchanges, one of the things that is quite tricky for us to pin down

as people come into contact with each other more increasingly, because what we do see initially after the first contact of crusading armies in the Holy Land is this, what Christians will call

the rediscovery of things that Muslims knew were never lost. Yeah, this idea that there's all these

books and this ancient Roman and Greek philosophy and learning that begins to plow back into Europe and is being translated into Latin. And this idea of a Renaissance period in Europe then being fueled by the crusading. And I guess it's hard, it definitely has an impact, but is that just because of crusading, or would that have happened anyway as trade happened? And as people just lived next to each other for long enough, maybe it happens faster, maybe the crusades cause it to happen

in a smash rather than a smooth process. But there is nevertheless this big cultural exchange that goes on during this period. And I guess before we finish, do we want to think about the modern legacies of crusading as it exists in the world today, which let's be frank, can be a tricky conversation to have, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Yeah, like,

“do I want to think about it? No, am I forced to every day? Yes, because I think, you know, especially”

in kind of like the 19th century and the early 20th century in particular, there comes about this really kind of silly and simplistic way of talking about the crusades, which is there's the whole

clash of civilizations thing. You know, this idea that, oh, the Muslims and Christians have always been

at war with each other. Look at the crusades and it's like, baby, what do you mean by Christian? What do you mean by Muslim? What does any of this mean? Right, and that is extrapolated from especially when we see things like, you know, the friction between, for example, yeah, again, the Ottoman Turks and us in World War I, you know, whatever has happened more recently in, you know, the Muslim world, you know, with like the rise of al-Habism and these ideals of, you know,

more pointed, cultural friction, I suppose, but you really can't look at the medieval crusades in

“any honesty and think that that is true, like honestly. No, I think this revival that happens in the”

19th century, it's no coincidence that it happens around the same time as imperialism and we've talked a lot about how crusading can be repurposed for political and territorial gain and I think that's what's happening in the 19th century, people are positioning things as crusades that aren't. And I think it's interesting that right to the modern day, you think there's examples all the way through the 20th century of things that are framed as a crusade, the second world war, a crusade

against Nazism. It becomes a word that is used to describe any struggle against something that you consider to be bad, you know, governments have a crusade to build housing. Is that a crusade? Listen, I think that I'm going to steal your point because I've heard you say this and I think it's such a good one. You know, when you use the word crusade, it is essentially interchangeable

“with the word g-hard and would you go around throwing that around in the same way?”

Just a question. I mean, a g-j-hat has several meanings as well that crusade simply doesn't. It can be about the internal struggle for a Muslim to be a better Muslim as well as the external one and that external one can be divided into a political approach and a military approach. But we tend to think of the word g-hard meaning, the Islamic military efforts against other religions.

And it's almost like we use crusading to be a good thing, but we never use the word g-hard to mean a

good thing. And I think, I think a lot of particularly Western Christian people associated g-hard with being a bad thing. Listen, ask any of the Christians who are living in anti-arg during the siege, how they feel about crusaders. It's all I would say, you know. Well, I think this has been a fairly fascinating exploration of some of the legacies of crusade, which are, I mean, that they're immediate, but they're also persistent. They exist into today,

don't they? We've seen so many different ways in which crusading and their crusading attitudes have shaped huge parts of the world right up until today. Absolutely. I don't think that there is any way to understand our world without understanding the crusades as a whole. It's just that there's so much to see there. I don't know if we'll ever really get to the bottom of it, which is why we can continue having fun conversations like this. Wow, we made it. Our Odyssey through the history

of the Crusades has come to an end. From the fields of Claremont in 1095 to the ruins of Acre in 1291, we've traced nearly two centuries of faith, ambition, slaughter, and catastrophe. We've seen how a movement born of pilgrimage, piety, and people reform exploded into the first crusade.

How crusading unraveled before the walls of Constantinople, and how, in the end,

“forces far beyond Western Europe swept the Crusader states from the eastern Mediterranean all together.”

If there's one thing this journey has shown us, it's that the crusades were never simply a clash

of civilizations, fitting Muslims against Christians. They were a tangled web of politics, a diplomatic

“chess game, a commercial opportunity, and a medieval epic that reshaped Europe and the wider world”

in ways that lasted far beyond the fall of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Thank you so much for listening and joining us on this ride, and thanks to Dr. Nicholas Morton again

“for joining me earlier in this episode. If you want to find out more, then do go and pre order”

his new book, The Crusader Storm, a global history of the wars for the Middle East.

And if this series has wetted your appetite, you can dive back into our back catalogue where we've explored everything from the albegencing crusade to the campaigns of the Tutonic Knights and the rise of Saladin. There are new instruments of god medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast and tell

all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to history here to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with the new release every week. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe right now. Anyway, I bet let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.