How to Survive a Medieval Crusade

What would it have been like to go on a medieval crusade? What dangers would you have faced on the gruelling journey to the Holy Land, and what would it have been like once you arrived? Dan and Matt Lewis, host of the 'Gone Medieval' podcast, discuss the logistical nightmares, deadly battles and harsh conditions faced by crusaders, and the brutal realities of these Church-sanctioned religious expeditions. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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• 2:21Dan Snow?

  On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a particularly impassioned sermon. Watching him, hanging on his every word, was a large group of French nobles and clergymen in Clermont. In the sermon, he talked about the terrible violence in European society. The necessity of maintaining peace, the peace of God, he called it. And then, perhaps in order to achieve that, he subtly changed tack. He talked about helping the Greeks in the East, i.e. the rulers of Constantinople, from the Muslim superpower that dominated what we now call the Middle East.

• 3:05Dan Snow?

  He pointed out those Greeks had been asking for assistance. He pointed out that in the Middle East, terrible crimes had been committed against Christians. And then he laid out his solution to all of those ills, a neat solution. A new kind of war: armed pilgrimage. "His nobles in the audience should cease fighting, quarreling amongst themselves, and instead unite and head east to take on the infidel, the Muslim lords of the Near East." He promised anyone who would die, that they would die a pilgrim. Their sins would be remitted, they would be rewarded in heaven. The crowd roared back: "Dais vault!"

• 3:50Dan Snow?

  God wills it. And that really was the start of the Crusades. A series of campaigns in which large groups of warriors left Europe, marched or sailed east and tried to re-Christianise the Holy Land. Now, some of these Crusades were well-funded. Some of them were led by dukes, counts and kings. Others were organised on a wing and a prayer. But all of them really had one thing in common. They were absurdly dangerous. Your chances of getting home were not great. It was dangerous getting there. Even the superhuman, the legendary Frederick Barbarossa, he drowned or somehow died in a river in Turkey on the way to the Holy Land.

• 4:34Dan Snow?

  And he was by no means alone. The terrain, the heat, disease, shortage of food cost the lives of thousands of Crusaders before they ever even set eyes on the holy sites. It was dangerous being in the Holy Land. It was dangerous being a foot soldier, because it always is. It was even dangerous being powerful. In 1119, at the Battle of the Field of Blood, Roger of Saleno had three and a half thousand men around him killed, hacked down, stamped beneath the feet of the Muslims. And he was among the dead. One of the great lords of the Holy Land, Raymond of Poitiers, he was killed in battle. His head presented to the legendary Muslim commander Saladin. It was dangerous even being away from the front lines.

• 5:19Dan Snow?

  Conrad of Montferrand was killed by assassins just after he'd been elected king of Jerusalem on his way back from the baths. It was also dangerous coming home. English King Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, was shipwrecked. And folks, those are the rich people. Some of the accounts of the normal people that we know about are harrowing. In the very early 1200s, a 12-year-old Stephen of Croy, he managed to attract large gangs of youths. He convinced them he was a miracle worker. He convinced them he was touched by the divine. They ended up leading thousands of young people to Marseille, telling them he'd take them to the Holy Land. They survived by begging for food along the route. When they arrived in Marseille, two merchants offered them to take them to the Holy Land

• 6:02Dan Snow?

  and promptly sailed them off to Tunisia and sold them into slavery. At the same time, oddly, it must have been a fashion, another spontaneous kind of bottom-up crusade was organised by a shepherd in Germany who led thousands of men across the Alps. Two-thirds of them died on that crossing of the Alps. They arrived in Italy, where he'd promised that God was going to part the waves and allow them to walk to the Holy Land. God did not part the waves. Nicholas died crossing the Alps on his way home. The big question is, how on earth do you survive a crusade? It's a question that I think many of them would like to have known. It's sad for their sake, they kind of listen to this podcast because we're going to answer that question. I've got Matt Lewis on the podcast.

• 6:44Dan Snow?

  He is the host of our sibling podcast, Gone Medieval. He is the presenter of our recent programme on Richard III, in which experts recreated the voice of Richard using his skeleton, using what we know about linguistics in medieval England, to come up with what they think is a pretty accurate version of the voice of Richard III. It's an amazing documentary. Please go and check it out on History Hit TV. Please go and subscribe to that. But in the meantime, folks, here is Matt Lewis telling us how to survive a crusade. Useful stuff.

• 7:32Dan Snow?

  Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast, buddy.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Thank you very much for having me, Dan.

• 7:36Dan Snow?

  I suppose, you know, we all think of the crusades and the battles and the politics, but let's just talk initially. I mean, it's a big old journey at the time. I mean, was that something for remarks upon? Was just the adventure, the journey of just getting to the Holy Land, part of the challenge?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  It's definitely part of the big logistical challenge. So going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land has always been something that's important. And, you know, you're talking thousands of miles of travel. So small groups of pilgrims trying to do this have always had their challenges to face to even get to the Holy Land. You know, it's a lot of travel through lands that aren't always entirely friendly. We get to kind of the first crusade happening and you're now talking about armed forces of thousands and thousands, moving like locusts across Europe, making for the Holy Land. It takes on a whole new dimension, I think, just even trying to get to the Holy Land, the logistics of moving, those kinds of numbers of people, that kind of distance.

• 8:36Dan Snow?

  Well, okay, let's pick up on the locust thing. Is there a sense that some of the European places in the way were not particularly grateful for these great swarms of people transiting across their territory? Or did they behave themselves and pay for all their food?

• 8:52Speaker 04

  For the most part in Europe, they are keen to pay for their food. They're travelling across Christian land, so they don't really have an interest in upsetting all of these neighbours at this point. But the logistics do become a massive issue. The best estimates that we have say something like 50,000 to 60,000 people are travelling, and that's around about 7,000 knights and then all of their squires, servants, all of those kinds of things. You can add on to that that each knight will have three horses. He'll have the pulfrey that he's riding, the comfortable horse to ride. He'll have the warhorse that he wants to ride into battle on, and he'll have a packhorse that's carrying all of his stuff. So if there's 7,000 knights, there's 21,000 horses probably. And all of those have to be fed and watered. There would be a train of carts behind them. Each of those

• 9:36Speaker 04

  carts has two oxen pulling it. So each of those two oxen is then going to be fed and watered as well. So you have to imagine that these huge forces would be arriving, hoovering up any spare food and access to water in a local area. There must have been kind of inflationary bubbles following them around as they just landed somewhere, bought up any spare food that was going on. It must have driven prices up through the roof and then they move on to the next kind of town, the next stopping point, and they do the same thing again. They can't really take food with them that won't perish for more than a fortnight. So they can fill up all of their supplies, but they're going to have to keep buying more and more stuff along the way as they go.

• 10:17Dan Snow?

  Yeah, and that's a key point, right? Today, we are used to logistics, canned food, frozen food, dried food. You can transport it around the world. You can bring your own food with you somewhere. What we're talking about here really is local sourcing of supplies, are we realistically?

• 10:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think we tried to do a bit of maths on this a little while ago. And if each person wants about a kilogram of food, and if each horse wants about nine kilograms worth of food, and then you've got to add in some oxen and things like that, you're talking about 14 articulated wagons worth of food following this army around all of the time. That's been consumed every day. So you've got to refill that volume of food. Every day. So if you can, you know, 14 articulated wagons full of of bread and grain and all of that kind of thing, it must have caused absolute chaos in the places that they visited.

• 11:06Dan Snow?

  Some crusades famously were better funded, I suppose, better organised, you could say, than others. There's a few that are sort of terrifying, the Children's Crusade, which we might come on to. But tell me, what was the People's Crusade like?

• 11:18Speaker 04

  The People's Crusade was utter chaos. So this was, the Pope has preached the first crusade in kind of 1095. It's taken a little while for the the noblemen to gather what they need. There's an issue for for the nobility in terms of funding it, but also who's looking after all of your lands while you go? You know, if you've got someone trustworthy who can take care of all that stuff while you're not going to be there for a long while. So we see people like Robert, the Duke of Normandy, the oldest son of William the Conqueror, will mortgage Normandy to his brother, William II of England, for 10,000 marks to raise money for the crusade. So there is a long process for these men to organise themselves

• 11:59Speaker 04

  and their forces. And in the crusading fervour that's been whipped up by the Pope, you get a lot of ordinary people who think, well, we don't have those issues. We could just all go to the Holy Land right now and get the job done. Isn't this brilliant? We don't have to wait. So you get this guy called Peter the Hermit, who nominates himself as leader of this huge group of people, to tens of thousands of people, who then decide to plough off across Europe. They make it a fair distance, but then they get to Hungary and they realise they don't actually have any food left. They begin pillaging, they begin trying to steal food and all of that kind of stuff. They fall out with the the Hungarians, who clearly don't like this. They're ends up in a massive battle, and most of the people

• 12:43Speaker 04

  of the People's Crusade are killed by soldiers in Hungary. So they don't even make it out of Europe in their effort to get to the Holy Land, and they are torn to shreds. And then this causes another problem for the what's called the Prince's Crusade that follows them, the the noblemen that are behind them. Because when they get to Hungary, all of a sudden, the Hungarians are like, woo, woo, woo, woo. We've seen this before. You are not welcome. And it takes them, you know, weeks to negotiate entry even into Hungary. So just getting out of Europe is problematic and potentially deadly. You know, people die inside the bounds of Europe trying to go on crusade.

• 13:18Dan Snow?

  We should finish off the poor old people's crusade because then some of them amazingly managed to get out of Hungary, having committed various atrocities and got in trouble with everyone and pogroms against Jewish people and communities. They did get to Constantinople and then the ruler of Constantinople knew a dodgy thing when he saw it and kind of transported them immediately, got them into Asia Minor, where, well, some of them made it quite a long way really, but they didn't last longer.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  No, that's it. You know, I think you can see in Constantinople, the emperor is kind of, you know, seeing what you've done in Hungary, just carry on through, carry on through, carry on through, gets them into Asia Minor. And for ordinary people, you know, they're now in a completely foreign climate, unfamiliar landscapes and surroundings, don't really have a clue what they're doing, lost a lot of their numbers, really struggling for leadership at this point. And, you know, anyone that made it that far probably doesn't make it too much further.

• 14:13Dan Snow?

  I thought only a couple of thousand people ever made it back to Europe. So Matt, let's talk about the better funded crusades now. Even getting across Europe, very challenging. Would they have marched all the way on foot or would they have, they've used the Mediterranean and tried to go by ship?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  So there are lots of potential ways to solve the issue of all of these people moving through the land of Europe. There were different routes that could be taken. So you could split the army up to minimise the impact that they're having on hoovering up all of that food everywhere that they visit. The two main options that you have are the sea route or the land route. So on the first crusade, lots of people prefer the land route. So they do march across Europe. They can diverge and take slightly different routes to make sure that there's reasonable access to food and things like that. You do get a few who make their way. So Robert, Duke of Normandy, will make his way down through Italy and will board a ship there and sail across the Mediterranean.

• 15:09Dan Snow?

  Poor Robert misses out on the crown of England when his brother, William the Second dies. I think he's making this journey and in that case going back from crusade. It's not just the dangers of the journey, but the opportunities you might be missing out on back home.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's all the issues that the nobles have with what, who's taking care of your lands while you're not there, you know, are you, can you trust someone? Or are you going to leave a massive dispute and come back? So Robert had made an arrangement with his brother William II, that if either of them died without heirs, they would succeed. So if William II died without an heir, Robert should be King of England. When William is mysteriously shot in a hunting accident in the New Forest, Robert is still on his way back from the Crusades and their little brother Henry, who's standing there going, well, this looks like an opportunity. And so if Robert had been on the spot, he would most likely have been King Robert I of England. But the fact that he's gone on crusade has cost him the Crown of England and, you know, and he will end up fighting his little brother Henry and eventually spend his, the rest of

• 16:06Speaker 04

  his life in prison, you know, will spend decades as his brother's prisoner. So going on crusade has cost him an awful lot back at home.

• 16:12Dan Snow?

  And the journey would cost many even more, it cost them their lives. So we got Robert going by boat from Italy and that was quite a common route, was it?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Not so much in the first Crusade. So they preferred the land route in the first Crusade, but as the crusading goes on, so by the second, third, fourth Crusades, people are using the sea route an awful lot more. So Richard I of England on the third Crusade will take ship and go through the Mediterranean. And it becomes a more preferred method of travel as the Crusades go on. But in the first Crusade, it was predominantly travelled by land.

• 16:46Dan Snow?

  And is there a big attrition rate? I mean, do you see, is it like that wonderful map of Napoleon's army entering Russia in 1812? Do you see a huge number of people starting off and a small number of people arriving as people drop by the wayside?

• 16:58Speaker 04

  It's not too bad for the princes' crusade in Europe. So they get to Constantinople, you know, they converge on Constantinople and there you've got the, the Emperor Alexios, who is the man who was asked for the help. So he's the cause of the Pope preaching the crusade. Alexios has said, we're struggling, we're about to be overrun, we need some help. So this army arrives and Alexios has imagined that he's going to have control of a bunch of mercenaries who are there to do his bidding. What he actually gets is an incredibly motivated army with its own leadership and its own agenda and its own aims, who just kind of want to march through Constantinople and get on with the job at hand. So part of what the army was expecting was lots of support from the Byzantine Empire, from Emperor Alexios.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  But because he's not quite got what he expected, he's less willing than he might have been to help them out. So they're losing a kind of local ally who they were relying on to back them up with lots of knowledge and lots of extra men and all of that kind of thing. So again, you know, they're, they're marching into different climates, different territories, things that they're not used to. People have been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but that's very, very different to going there for a war. Does Western European armour work in a desert hot environment? Can you fight in those kinds of things? Do Western European military cavalry tactics work in the mountains of the Near East? You're going up against a foe at that point. Once you cross the Bosporus and you get out

• 18:28Speaker 04

  of Europe, you're fighting a foe who know that landscape, who know how to operate in it, and you very definitely don't. So you see lots of ambushes in the mountains and things like that. So even the journey to try to get anywhere near Jerusalem becomes incredibly dangerous and, and people are lost, you know, along the way. Again, lots of people don't make it to Jerusalem.

• 18:50Dan Snow?

  Well, you've mentioned the warfare there. Let's get to the battlefield. If we survive the journey, somehow you've managed to get to the Holy Land. We have this sort of vision of the Crusades, don't we? It's a particularly brutal clash of civilizations. You've come on the podcast and done a wonderful series with me about the Wars of the Roses. Do you think that's true? Was there, was there something particular about the violence? Was no quarter given? Was it a very dangerous theatre of war?

• 19:14Speaker 04

  I think it was because it has that religious element to it. You know, you are fighting people who, from the previous year when the Pope has preached the Crusade, Muslims have been othered. And, and from the Muslim point of view, you've suddenly got this Christian army invading what you understand to be your lands, your territory. So you do have a kind of really... Vicious edge to this. There is, there is no need to give quarter. The Pope has told you that if you go and kill Muslims, you will go to heaven. All of your sins will be forgiven and you'll go to heaven. So there is a real motivation for the Christian army to seek out and kill as many Muslims as they possibly can. They've been told that they're doing

• 19:58Speaker 04

  God's work. The, the counter to that, I guess, is that during this period pitched battles are still not really a thing. So in, in Western European Christian military training, they will teach you to avoid battles wherever you can because they're way too unpredictable. And if you're moving into territory that you don't know very well, that's kind of doubled. So warfare in Europe in this period will rely an awful lot on sieges, siege warfare. And that's what the Western Christians will take to the Holy Land with them. So the First Crusade in particular is, is an awful lot about sieges of, of cities along the way that they will try to capture. And even that, you know, that brings with it its own difficulties and challenges. The biggest problem for an army of this size on campaign in the medieval

• 20:43Speaker 04

  period is disease. So if you sit outside the walls of a city for weeks and weeks and weeks with a, a small camp that you need to be able to defend with all of the toilets inside it and all of the sweaty men and everything else that's going on inside the camp, it's kind of a breeding ground for disease. So while you're sitting outside this town trying to starve them to death and deprive them of water and cause them to surrender, you're actually facing all of your own problems as well. And we see a big attrition rate for, for disease in the camps during the period. So the spiritual leader of the First Crusade will die when there's an outbreak of plague in one of the Crusader camps during a crusade. Obviously, when they dig a hole to bury him, they find a piece of the true cross in the hole that they dig. As you do, you know, you have to find things like that on crusade, don't you?

• 21:29Dan Snow?

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• 24:14Dan Snow?

  So your guess is that you might die of disease than go down fighting in battle against Muslim forces?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and once they're in foreign territory and hostile territory as well, the army were then relying on being able to pillage food and things like that. But they find that those supplies are really, really scarce. So what the people in the regions are really good at is hiding their food out of the way. So they simply can't get access to as much food as they thought they would. Water becomes incredibly scarce, you know, they're trying to lay siege to cities without very good reliable water supplies of their own. So while they're trying to starve those inside the city, they're finding themselves hitting real, real problems. And I guess ultimately, the measure of the attrition rate comes in the fact that when they actually get to Jerusalem and lay siege to it, the reports tell us that of the 50,000 to 60,000 people that left Europe,

• 25:04Speaker 04

  there were about 12,000 people left. So kind of 80% of the army doesn't make it to Jerusalem.

• 25:11Dan Snow?

  Wow, I suppose some of those would have been left behind to garrison castles that they'd captured, but that is a pretty big attrition rate, isn't it?

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, some will have gone home, some have been left behind. So there are noblemen who are at Desa and Tripoli and places like that are being taken and people are trying to claim those, they will become the crusader states. They're trying to build their own little landed areas there. So they're staying behind with garrisons. Some may have been invalided home and things like that. But the bottom line is that 80% of those who left Europe don't get to Jerusalem to lay siege to it.

• 25:39Dan Snow?

  Crikey. And then that siege was a bloody affair. There were some battles, weren't there? Like Hattin, I've often thought if you offered me a time machine, I would specifically not go to the battlefield of Hattin in 1187. An astonishing defeat in horrific conditions for the Crusader army and enormous casualties.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And someone like Hattin, you know, it lays bare the arrogance of the Christian Crusaders in the Holy Land, I guess. You know, Saladin is well aware that he can lure them away, he can mock them and whatever else, lure them away from their water supplies and stuff like that. They traipse out into the middle of the hot desert and it takes away all of their advantages. You know, there's a lot of Templars involved in Hattin. They're considered the elite fighting force of the Christian armies at that point, but they're not enough to save the Christians at Hattin. And what Saladin has done is exploit the weaknesses that he can see in the Christians. He takes them away from their water sources, away from anything they're familiar with, and then just crushes them completely and

• 26:40Speaker 04

  utterly. But yeah, I think it probably exposes a little bit of arrogance on the part of the Christians who think, well, you know, we're here now, we know what we're doing. And they clearly really don't.

• 26:50Dan Snow?

  And all the Templars, I learned from your podcast, Matt, all the Templars at the end of that battle, all of them captured, lined up and executed by the Islamic commander, Saladin.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's kind of as a mark of respect for them almost because they are viewed as the elite fighting force of the Christian army and the ones that Saladin won't allow to go back and take up arms against him again.

• 27:10Dan Snow?

  But a lot of the time, as you say, microbes do the job for the Muslims. But is it Seventh Crusade, Louis the Ninth in Egypt? They land in Egypt on the Nile and they're just sit there and are decimated by disease. Terrifying.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is a constant problem for armies in Europe. You know, we see plenty of Western Christian leaders dying of disease in Europe. Henry V will die of dysentery that he contracts on campaign. So disease is kind of a never ending problem for them. And the Ninth Crusade will suffer. They go with the aim of conquering and crushing Egypt and essentially just sit there and wither away.

• 27:48Dan Snow?

  Does your social status matter? I'm guessing it helps to be richer.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  It does in that you you probably have first access to the food and the water and all of that kind of thing. So I would say, much like being in Europe, being at home, the wealthier will be the first to be better looked after. If food becomes incredibly expensive because it's scarce, the wealthier you are, the more food you can still afford to buy. And it's those further down the the scale, the the foot soldiers, the ordinary people, the the hangers on around the camp, who are going to suffer first and suffer most.

• 28:24Dan Snow?

  And is there, I mean, medical provision? I mean, if you, did doctors do more harm than good? Or do you think there was a bit of wisdom around that would have helped some people take on these diseases and and avoid them if they could afford it?

• 28:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, medical provision was pretty good. Again, if you're rich enough to be able to afford to have a doctor and a physician around. So I think medicine was was probably in better shape in the medieval period than we often give them credit for. They didn't understand germ theory, which is why you get so many issues with illnesses in camps. But they're not sometimes a million miles away. They understand that having so many men crowded together in dirty conditions isn't great. They're aware that bad smells can lead to illnesses, which isn't a million miles away from understanding germ theory. But you always have to balance that against the practical reality of if you're in a hostile territory, you need to keep your camp as compact as you possibly can, but allow enough room for disease not to spread. It's always a difficult balance, and they very often get that balance wrong.

• 29:21Dan Snow?

  We've talked about fighting there, trying to exist in the Holy Land. But there's all sorts of accounts in the Crusade of of the journey back of whether whether retreating with the tail between the legs, or even just getting back. I mean, it's just as dangerous.

• 29:36Speaker 04

  It is. So, I mean, after particularly the first Crusade, they take Jerusalem, it's pretty horrendous, blood running through the streets of Jerusalem. And then for for a lot of people, On the, on the Christian side of it, they consider then that their pilgrimage is done. They're viewing this as a pilgrimage. They've been sent by the Pope to recapture Jerusalem and then all of their sins will be forgiven and they're guaranteed entry into heaven. So having taken Jerusalem, your job is done and you can now go home. Some people remain in the Holy Land, but we're probably talking hundreds of knights out of those 7,000 that left Europe. If they think they can get a nice piece of land, so there'll be the Count of Odessa, there'll be the Prince of Antioch, who in himself is a really interesting

• 30:20Speaker 04

  guy, the first Prince of Antioch, Bohemund of Taranto, then everyone else decides that they want to go home. And you've then got the same problems that you had in getting there in reverse, except that you're now exhausted after a couple of years of fighting and trying to survive and exist in the Holy Land to try and get home. And I mean, the most famous example of problems getting home is Richard the Lionheart of England, who is captured on his way back home and imprisoned and charged kind of two years' worth of income for the English Crown as a ransom to release himself. So there are potential issues for everybody just to get home again as well at the end of it.

• 30:59Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere, there's more to come.

• 31:09Speaker 02

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• 31:51Speaker 02

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• 31:58Speaker 01

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• 32:49Dan Snow?

  We should probably nod to the fact, the most famous celebrity couple who went on crusade, and the crusade was the breaking of them. You know what they say, travel, it makes or breaks you. It certainly was the breaking of them, partly because of the reasons that we're describing. Talk to me about the king and queen of France when they went on crusade together.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  So this would be the second crusade. We have Louis VII of France and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, which is a name we probably don't need to say anymore about. But Louis is quite a funny one in that there's a doubt whether he ever really wanted to go on crusade, so much as he just wanted to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He's an incredibly pious and devout man, not much of a soldier. He then thought, well, I'll be the first king to lead a crusade. But then the king of Germany hops on alongside him. So then I think Louis is a little bit like, oh, I wanted to be the only king. So then you've got problems of leadership going on around it and all of that kind of thing. They travel there together.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  We will get later stories that Eleanor rode with all of her women, bare-breasted all of the way to the Holy Land, which is just bizarre and weird and definitely never happened. I'd imagine that the windburn would have been pretty atrocious if you tried anything like that. And then when they get to the Holy Land, we have this famous incident where Eleanor is accused of having an affair with her uncle Raymond, who is Prince of Antioch, one of the Crusade estates there. And this seems to be the result of Louis arriving there, Raymond of Antioch giving him some military advice about good targets, ways to approach this so that they can secure Jerusalem, and Louis ignoring him. And it seems like Eleanor was saying, well, hang on, we've got a guy here on the ground who knows what he's talking

• 34:30Speaker 04

  about. We should hear him out and listen to his advice. And Louis utterly refuses to pay any attention to Raymond. And then it seems like because Eleanor took the side of her uncle over her husband, the only possible explanation that medieval chroniclers can come up with for this was that they were having an affair together. So we get this random story that Eleanor was sleeping with her uncle during the Second Crusade. But then they will, they will go on to towards Jerusalem. There is an incident when they're crossing over a mountain, they call it Mount Cadmus, and the army gets a bit too strung out and they're attacked by Seljuk Turks who try to ambush them. Louis is almost killed. A couple of his bodyguards are killed during the fighting. And this is blamed on Eleanor

• 35:15Speaker 04

  because one of her vassals is the man at the front of the army, who's apparently been moving too far forward, strung the army out too much. So it's Eleanor's fault that Louis almost gets killed on the crusade as well. Just to highlight as well, the difference between the higher and the lower fortunes during this, after this incident, Louis decides to take ship and sail down the coast with some of his men and sends the rest of the army to march on. And they end up getting ambushed all the way south. They lose vast numbers just on that march south. And then kind of Louis and Eleanor get off ship and go, oh, that was a lovely journey. How's everybody else? And everybody else is not really very well. And Louis will essentially end up, he gets into Jerusalem, but only

• 35:55Speaker 04

  as a pilgrimage. So they will spend Easter in Jerusalem. But there's no kind of military victory to this. After Easter, they will turn around and go home. Their marriage is looking pretty shaky by this point. There's talk of them splitting up. The Pope gives them a bed to sleep in and blesses it and tells them that if they spend the night in that bed, they'll have a child. And nine months later, they do have a child. But it's a daughter, it's not the son that Louis wants. And that journey seems to have been the real catalyst towards the end of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage, which will break up a year or so after they get back to France. So, as you say, you know, travel can put a weight on the relationship as well.

• 36:40Dan Snow?

  But happily Eleanor then chooses the much better husband. She marries Henry II of England and that is the period when we see this vast Plantagenet empire stretching from Ireland all the way down to the Pyrenees.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  And Henry has an interesting crusader connection in that his family, so his granddad has gone off to be king of Jerusalem. And when Jerusalem is beginning to face lots and lots of problems again later on in Henry's life, so towards the third quarter of the 12th century, the patriarch of Jerusalem comes to England to ask Henry, they bring the keys to the city of Jerusalem and ask Henry to go and be the king. It's the time of Baldwin the leper, who's looking like he's not going to last too long. And essentially this family connection of Henry to the crown and the fact that he is so devastatingly effective in Europe and such a powerful figure leads the patriarch of Jerusalem to literally go and offer him the crown of Jerusalem. And Henry just kind of says, no, thank you.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  But then we do see his son, an eventual heir, you know, his second son, who will eventually succeed him, Richard, kind of really gripped by that crusading fervour that his dad simply didn't seem to have.

• 37:49Dan Snow?

  Well, unfortunately, he may have had a bit of fervour, but Richard and then his useless brother John went and threw away that wonderful Plantagenet patrimony, that wonderful empire. Anyway, we're digressing a little bit here. I should say, by the way, we mentioned Richard, Henry the second son. He was captured on the way home and he was ransomed. Speaking of captives, if the Muslims captured crusaders, would they ransom them if they were wealthy enough or enslave them, kill them? What was the fate of those who survived disease, survived battle, but then fell into the enemy's hands?

• 38:18Speaker 04

  It varied and slightly depended on who you were. So as we've seen the Battle of Hattin, the Templars are killed after the battle because they're simply too much of a threat to be allowed to continue. So otherwise, noble prisoners might be treated with a bit more respect, they might be ransomed, there's a fair chance that you might well end up executing. And that was reciprocated. So the Christians were diabolical for slaughtering Muslims. You know, Richard I is considered successful on the third crusade. You know, he arrives at the Siege of Acre, which has been going on for a couple of years, and the city falls within kind of weeks of his arrival. And he's viewed as driving the victory at Acre. And

• 39:00Speaker 04

  he then marches south, has all of these military victories, appears almost unstoppable. But he will end up slaughtering thousands of Muslim prisoners because cities refuse to bow to him. And there's issues around feeding and taking care of that kind of many prisoners. But he will end up, you know, slaughtering prisoners of war on a vast scale outside city walls in acts of cruelty, evil. You know, this is diabolical cruelty to people who consider to be othered from yourself. So I think prisoners on both sides could probably not expect too much mercy if they were captured.

• 39:41Dan Snow?

  It does make you wonder whether people would have regretted their religious enthusiasm when they set out. I mean, is it possible to just make any estimates about the chance of surviving a crusade? I mean, I know every crusade is different and people might want to stay in garrison or fortress. But if something like 20 or 15% of the original number that set out the first crusade actually arrived at Jerusalem, and that was a successful crusade, then can we speculate about some of the others?

• 40:09Speaker 04

  I mean, from that point on, the second crusade is a disaster. The third crusade is kind of a score draw. The Christians don't win, but they they reach an arrangement with Saladin and withdraw from the Holy Land. And then the crusades just start to go more and more wrong after that. So if only 20% of those who left Europe made it to Jerusalem, even if we allow for the fact that some may have been garrisoning towns along the way. So even if we stretch that to say, maybe 30 odd percent of the people didn't die by the time the crusade got to Jerusalem, and that was a positive, successful victory, and your odds after that go down. I mean, what we can say, you've got a one in five chance, if you leave Europe, of ever coming back?

• 40:52Dan Snow?

  That says something about the astonishing optimism of young males, that they they think, well, most of us will die, but it won't be me. Let's get on with it. Let's go.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  I said, if one in five is coming back, you better believe I'm going to be that one.

• 41:05Dan Snow?

  Yeah, astonishing. So more dangerous going on crusade than going over the top at the Battle of the Somme?

• 41:11Speaker 04

  It might well have been. I mean, it's a scary thought, isn't it?

• 41:14Dan Snow?

  Amazing. Thank you so much, Matt, for coming on the podcast and talking all about it. People can go and listen to more, Matt, alongside his brilliant co-host, Eleanor Jarniger, on the Gone Medieval podcast, where you do a lot of this kind of thing, don't you, Matt?

• 41:27Speaker 04

  We do. So we like to give overviews of medieval topics where we can, but we also like to get really deep into the weeds of it all, too. So there is there is day to day stuff, there is the big battles and the big personalities. There are also the daily life factors of the medieval world, archaeological finds, new discoveries. We try to cover as much as we can of the greatest millennium in human history.

• 41:48Dan Snow?

  Oh, well, hang on a second. And also, your recent show was so great on History Hit, reconstructing Richard III's voice. That got a lot of publicity.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this was the result. I mean, obviously, anyone who listens to Gone Medieval will know that I'm obsessed with Richard III. But he's almost the the kind of side benefit for me of this project. This was a 10 year long project to look at if we've got someone's physical human remains, and we've got some material that they wrote during their lifetime, and we've got experts like Professor David Crystal, who can talk about the original pronunciation, the way that words were said in the 15th century. Can we bring all of that together and get as close as we possibly can to hearing the tone, the pitch, the pronunciation of someone who would have spoken?

• 42:37Speaker 04

  More than 500 years ago, and the project believed that they've got sort of 90 to 95% accuracy, you know, there when we die, the muscles on our face leave marks on our bones and our skull that will tell you about the strength of facial muscles at the time at which you've died. And they can measure from the jaw and things like that, the space that's inside the mouth, the soft palate, and the effect that that would have had on the the tone and pitch of your voice. So this has brought together kind of history and science and technology and manuscripts and art. There is a digital facial reconstruction with facial movements and the voice layered over the top of it. It's been an absolutely incredible thing to be involved in and to see all of those different disciplines coming

• 43:20Speaker 04

  together to give someone back their voice after centuries of silence.

• 43:25Dan Snow?

  Well done, you Matt. Such a great project. Thanks for going. Check it out, everyone. It's on the History Hit TV channel. You go and subscribe. It's the world's greatest history channel. You get wonderful documentaries like that every single week of the year. Thanks so much for coming on the show, buddy.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit

• 44:29Speaker 02

  approval. Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

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• 44:53Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.