How and Why the Crusades Started

This is your guide to almost two centuries of holy war - from start to finish. We untangle faith, politics and myth, and reveal how the Crusades reshaped Europe, the Middle East and relations between Islam and Christianity forever. For this series, we're joined by Steve Tibble, author of many books on the Crusades, including 'The Crusader Armies: 1099 - 1187'. Produced by James Hickmann and McKenna Fernandez, and edited by Jhenelle White. Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast 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. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. 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?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player. The Crusades, a series of terrible wars spanning two centuries. Holy wars, European knights, orders of warrior monks invading what we now call the Middle

• 0:41Dan Snow?

  East in a series of desperate attempts to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity. The Crusaders believed that they were carrying out the work of God and they hoped to return home wealthy and cleansed of their sins. Their Muslim opponents thought very much the same thing. Kingdoms and principalities rose and fell, their fates dependent on the sword's blade. Two hundred years, millions dead, massive sieges, savage battles, innumerable skirmishes, ambushes and raids. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit, where for the next three episodes, I'll be joined by historian Steve Tybalt, as we bring you a new mini-series, The Complete History of the Crusade.

• 1:24Dan Snow?

  Steve is the author of several books on the Crusades, including his latest Assassins and Templars: A Battle in Myth and Blood. He knows everything that there is to know about this period of history, so we're lucky to have him with us today. From the first cries, that first rallying call in Clermont, to the last stand on the smashed, burning ramparts of Acre, this is everything you need to know about the Crusades, from start to finish. Enjoy.

• 1:55Dan Snow?

  Steve, thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Oh, it's lovely to be here, Dan.

• 1:58Dan Snow?

  It's a big one today. We're gonna get limbered up for this. It's not gonna be easy. First of all, we've got a lot to get through. First big question, why the Crusades? Can you just try and give me a sense of what is that impulse that's seeing those Europeans march east?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, wow, that's the biggie. If I think if we knew the answer definitively, you and I would be writing the book of it. I think what's important to understand is that there are so many bigger forces at play here. You know, it's very easy to talk about, you know, one man doing this or one man doing that. And in reality, it's far bigger. You almost have to look back into the 11th century where there's major climate change on the steppes. So it's not even about individuals. It's almost anthropology. And it's certainly not originally religion. So

• 2:50Speaker 01

  you have a whole bunch of nomads, pastoralists in the steppes. Climate change towards the middle of the 11th century forces them into activity. You know, their animals are dying, their water's going, they've got nowhere to go. So they have to move. They have to move. And in most cases, they moved west and pushed west into either Byzantine areas or Arab controlled areas. So they have to get into the Middle East to survive. And it's one of those things where, you know, these guys were nominally Muslim, but they weren't theologians. You know, these are pretty rough guys. They still love astrology. They love hard liquor. You know, they love drugs.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  These are not Orthodox Muslims, and they're not moving because of religion. They're moving because of climate change, anthropology. So ironically, I think the two biggest forces that propel the Crusades are the ones that we think of as being modern. And that's climate change and migration. And the combination of those two is, you know, incredibly strong.

• 3:57Dan Snow?

  And so these steppe peoples, they are, among other places, they're crashing into what we now call Turkey. That's the sort of area of the Byzantine Empire. They're Christians. They used to put up the bat signal. They're asking for help?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so. It's Gotham City. But it goes much further than that. So they attack. The Byzantine Empire, Anatolia, as it is, Turkey, as we'd call it now. But they also moved down into Syria, Palestine, different points, they take Jerusalem. They basically give everybody a good kicking. And that happens regardless of religion. Because I think as a lot of historians, European, we tend to take a Eurocentric perspective. And we kind of think, oh, well, it's all about us. You know, it's all about a clash of cultures between, you know, Europeans in the Middle East or Christians versus Islam.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  In reality, when the nomads arrived, because it's not really driven by religion, they just pile into everybody. All the local states to the south are Arab. And they get a good kicking as well. You know, these guys are not, so they're equal opportunity bandits. And they're attacking the Byzantine Empire, they're attacking the Egyptian, the Fatimid Empire in Egypt. They're knocking out all the local Syrian Arab states as well. And you're absolutely right, the bat signal from Byzantium pulls in the Crusaders. But equally, the Fatimids in Egypt, you know, their own equivalent of the bat signal goes out. They're pulling in Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans as slaves or as mercenaries.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  You get all the Arab states calling in guys to help them. It's basically a huge military and anthropological convention. And they're pulling in everybody from all over the known world. And for 200 years, that is the kind of, you know, mass mayhem that the Crusades are.

• 5:55Dan Snow?

  And as you get with mass mayhem, it sucks in, yeah, sucks in all sorts of other people. What about, that's the pull, there is some push. I mean, there's, the Pope famously stands up and is like, let's go to the, let's go to the Holy Land and carve out. And there's something going on there.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, again, the old tropes, there are many old tropes. That's the good thing about Crusades, everybody loves it. So there's plenty of scope for overgeneralization. I think in the past, there have been people who felt that it was kind of proto-European imperialism.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I think from a, from a, a western perspective, we have to remember that the Middle East was not traditionally a Muslim area. It was actually a Christian area. It was part of the Roman Empire. Um, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land, um, Turkey. These were all Christian countries with a Christian population before the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. And then again, these kind of neo uh Muslim guys coming in from the steps. So it's not a sense of, of people invading. They would, the Crusaders would have seen what they were doing as helping to recover old Christian lands. And the call from the east, the call from Byzantium or from the patriarch of Jerusalem, whoever you think

• 7:13Speaker 01

  did make the call, who, who pressed the button on the bat signal. The, um, you know, that, that would have been seen as, as our guys from Western Europe coming to protect their Christian compatriots in the east.

• 7:26Dan Snow?

  So still, still big Christian communities throughout what we now, what we now call the Middle East.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Uh, and there have been until fairly recently. In fact, the, you know, we don't have census data. You don't have a lot of quantitative data, but um, it is pretty clear that the majority of the population of the Crusader states, the countries that the Crusaders established there were, were still Christian. Um, so the majority was Christian. There was a big Muslim minority. But the, most of the people who lived there were Christians. Either Catholic Crusaders or Greek Orthodox or Jacobites or Melkites. So, you know, there's all different kinds of Christians, but it was a big melting pot. And it was a very big ethnic melting pot. Uh, in a way that again, we don't appreciate. You know, we, we tend to see other Crusaders, these kind of

• 8:15Speaker 01

  white guys in invading the Middle East. But in fact, most Crusader armies on the ground, most Frankish armies would have consisted mainly of non Europeans. They would have been Arabs or Syrians or Armenians.

• 8:29Dan Snow?

  Locally.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Local Christians. Yeah.

• 8:31Dan Snow?

  Okay. Well, let's get the first crusade underway. Uh, the Pope gives a, a stirring call to arms, doesn't he, in the West? And young men uh flock to the colors and decide to go to the east. What, what taught me just highlight the first crusade? What's going on?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the, the trouble is it wasn't just young men. I th- I think the, uh, that what the Pope had in mind, in as much as we can tell, um. Was it that it would be a military expedition? And what you want for a military expedition are people with weapons, resources, skills, uh, you know, kind of important things like that. What you don't want i- is a bunch of kind of weirdos, um, religious fanatics, uh, women and children, you know, these, these are a hindrance, they're taking food that, that the fighting men could have, they're a danger to themselves, um, and so on. But part of the tragedy of the first crusade was that so many people answered the call.

• 9:28Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  And, and, and I think although, although you can say the ultimate causes of the crusades are not religious, you know, they, whatever it might be, climate change, migration, the, the proximate causes were often religious, you know, those were the kind of, the things that motivated individuals. And I think you and I, you know, however religious we are, we, we can never be as religious as they were, you know, for them, it's like, wow, they really did believe that their immortal soul was at danger if they broke their word, if you did, if you committed a sin, you would have another thousand years in purgatory or, or whatever, you know, they lived in that realm of spirituality that, that's actually hard to even imagine now or take seriously.

• 10:12Dan Snow?

  And so there is something really exciting going on for those people, or certainly, you know, they're, they're caught up in this passion.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Dan Snow?

  And, and there's a big movement, okay, so the first crusade.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:21Dan Snow?

  Uh, uh, uh, are people, are, are kings and are kings going on this crusade or are they sort of second sons without any, uh, without any, uh, prospects here at home, they're not going to inherit the estates?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does tend to be the, um, you know, the second layer down.

• 10:35Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  That go, um, it's probably not second sons looking to find their fortune, um, that used to be an idea, uh, kind of a proto Marxist explanation for the crusades, but in reality, to go on crusade, you nearly always bankrupted yourself, you know, the chances of, of, it's not, if you wanted to get rich quick, sort of project, this wouldn't be it.

• 10:56Dan Snow?

  Yeah, we got William the Conqueror's oldest son, Robert, he goes, doesn't he?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah, and, and, you know, does well, but then come straight back, you know, so it's, again, it comes down to piety and that is the trigger, I mean, powerful people were pious and poor people were pious and the.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  The piety lives alongside a lot of other motivations, you know, as human beings, we're very complicated.

• 11:22Dan Snow?

  It's complicated.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  We're horrible creatures, you know, we can have all these conflicting ideas in our heads and they're simultaneously there.

• 11:28Dan Snow?

  Right, well, let's but let's let's chart the course of that crusade, they're marching overland or are they taking ships?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  They're they're marching overland. Critically, um, they take off in waves, so they don't go off as, you know, you would think the obvious thing is to go one big army and then off we go and da da da. In in reality, that's never going to be possible because they don't have the logistics, you know, if you're living off the land, you cannot go in one big lump, so you have to go in dribs and drabs. But worse, which is bad, as you can imagine, on some levels, because it means you're arriving piecemeal. Um, but it's even worse because you get a whole bunch of guys who don't prepare. So I so ironically, to get to get a proper crusade together takes time because you need to get your guys together, you need to get your money together, you get your transport.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  It's all the boring stuff, logistics, but that's what makes it work. But the really enthusiastic ones, the uh, you know, the paupers, uh, who maybe had a few lower knights with them, but they were really religious enthusiasts, they really felt that that that, you know, that a new world was happening, this is like a change in the entire entire world, and they set off first.

• 12:40Dan Snow?

  They just start walking.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  They do, and they're no good, you know, they're they're a menace to themselves, they're a menace to the local Jewish communities who they they massacre and kill on the way in the Rhineland. Um, it's very unhelpful, the papacy doesn't want them to do this, there are, in fact, there are entire parts of the crusade that are closed down by the papacy because they're killing Jews and it's not a good thing.

• 13:03Dan Snow?

  A little bit too bottom up, but you know, the papacy wants to, I guess, exert some control here.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely, it this, the papacy is at the heart of the crusading movement. I mean, whichever way you cut the cake, whatever answer or cause you come up with, the papacy is a big propelling power in moving it forward. And they and they encourage much more organised contingents. The trouble the trouble is that you can't stop some of the guys just getting over excited and they they do their thing.

• 13:30Dan Snow?

  What happened, I mean, it's astonishing they enjoyed any success, really, isn't it? Because they but they do erupt into the Near East, into, you know, what is now Turkey, what is now Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  And actually, what what happens though, because it doesn't, it amazingly, it it doesn't go that badly. Yeah, I know, I know. And to be honest, that I think is the the bigger tragedy of the Crusades, is that it all went so incredibly well. And it gave everybody a false sense of expectations and capabilities. They thought, oh blimey, you know, God is on our side, good Lord, uh, literally. And, you know, anything is possible. That so they they took the overland route, they they fought on their way through, they had some Byzantine help. Um, they they had successful sieges, they discovered fabulous relics, you know, that it was almost like science fiction for people who didn't get out of the village very much, you know, they were travelling thousands of miles.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Seeing objects that they believed had been touched by God, had been, you know, the lance that had pierced Jesus. Um, and that God was on their side and had helped them against huge odds. What what they didn't fully appreciate, I think. Is that they'd arrived at an incredibly good time. Almost by coincidence, the whole of the Muslim world had had kind of fractured at that point, a whole load of the local leaders had died. Um, there was a lot of infighting and there was no coordinated Muslim response. There was also very little jihad. You know, we'd we'd tend to think of it as being Crusaders versus jihadists now, but jihad as a as a movement. Took a long time to gain gain steam. I think they just saw the the Crusaders as, you know, another bunch of Nazis coming into the region and

• 15:12Speaker 01

  making a nuisance of themselves. So the real tragedy is that it was so successful, uh, against all the odds. And they do capture Jerusalem. They do, ten ninety nine, the the guys get down there. Um, they put it under a loose siege, because there aren't that many of them and Jerusalem is, you know, has decent walls and it's, you know, a big, bigish city. Um, but they take it and again, they take it very quickly.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  They then get confronted by the Fatimids, who by this time, the Fatimids are in control of Egypt, they have an empire, and they were in control of Jerusalem as well. So for them, again, they had seen the Crusaders as a bunch of weirdos from a far-off place, and they had seen them as almost useful, because they were giving the Sunni Muslims a good kicking, and the Fatimids were Shiites. But then, when the Crusaders were so successful, they thought, oh my god, we've just replaced one enemy with another. So a huge Egyptian army burst into the Holy Land, leaving with the Crusaders with one

• 16:22Speaker 01

  final big battle, and they were hugely outnumbered. And in the face of such huge numbers, the Crusaders did the really weird but correct thing, which was they just marched straight at them, surprised them. I still don't quite understand how an army of whatever it was, 5,000 infantry, can surprise anyone walking through a desert, but they did. And they utterly smashed the Egyptian army. Again, everybody thinks, wow, God's on our side. Yeah, and you can understand, it must have felt like that.

• 16:55Dan Snow?

  So at the end of that first crusade, as you say, it's gone swimming here, and I guess that's why we're having this discussion, because we're talking about the Crusades, there'd be many more to come. And if that had been stamped out, it would have just been a foot, I suppose, a raid. You've got the establishment of these Christian states through what we might call the Holy Land, right? So there is Antioch, there's the area around Jerusalem.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yes, there's Odessa, there's what became known as the county of Tripoli, which is modern-day Lebanon. The important thing to remember is that most people on the Crusade saw it as an event and a journey. So most people thought, okay, this is, wow, great, this is an armed pilgrimage, a very violent pilgrimage, we're going to go to Jerusalem, do the holy things, and then...

• 17:48Speaker 01

  At this point, I hadn't seen the wife and kids for three years. Most, most of them, maybe three quarters of the Crusaders just went home. And you, you can't blame them. I mean, they'd, you know, a lot of them had died, a lot of them, they'd seen things they couldn't ever forget, and they were, they were going home. But it did create a big problem because if you saw the Crusaders being the recovery of the Holy Land, rather than, you know, just, you know, a visit, uh, then you had to defend it.

• 18:14Dan Snow?

  Someone's got to hold on to it.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:16Dan Snow?

  And this now is the recurring problem.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:18Dan Snow?

  That underpins.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  This is the story of the next 200 years. And this is the tragedy, because having got there by, by luck, really, and, and having got a false sense of your own capabilities, you're then stuck with the much bigger problem of how do you hang on? So for 200 years, you have relatively small Crusader states, surrounded, outnumbered, capable of being overwhelmed, if anybody can get their act together. And they're hanging on by their fingernails the whole time.

• 18:47Dan Snow?

  Right. Well, that lets get to the second Crusade. So we're, we're moving forward almost 50. This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalized concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own, so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus,

• 19:29Dan Snow?

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• 20:03Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialised. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 20:47Speaker 02

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  Me, Matt Lewis.

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• 21:04Speaker 02

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• 21:19Dan Snow?

  Gis.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:20Dan Snow?

  What, why is there, why is there a second crusade?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, their Muslim neighbours are getting their act together. As you can imagine, and why wouldn't they? And there's one guy in particular called Zengi, who's a very, very brutal and very effective, but very, very brutalised character, who leads his armies against the county of Odessa. And in particular, the city of Odessa.

• 21:48Dan Snow?

  And Odessa now, where is Odessa? It's in Syria.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  That is Syria, Turkey. We actually don't know where the county was.

• 21:56Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  In total, and this is a sure sign of a place that's in danger, is that you don't know where the eastern frontier is, where it was so fluid. And, and the thing about Odessa is that it, it kind of bleeds out into the steppes. It's the route where these nomads are coming down from. So if you if you want to think of a really bad place to set up a colony.

• 22:17Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Um. That's it, you know, because you're going to be outnumbered and you're going to have these really tough guys coming down the whole time. Um. So you would say probably that's going to be the first crusader state to go, and that's exactly what happened. So Zengi. And his huge army go through it, uh, eleven forty four. And that starts to chip away at the uh, at the eastern part of of of Odessa. And then over the next couple of years, he rolls up a lot of the rest of it. So you can imagine this is this is a shock to the guys back in Europe, because I think they'd had this. Impression that somehow, because God clearly was on their side and made it possible in the first place.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  That that the crusader states were going to last forever and they didn't need a lot of help, you know, in reality, it was quite the opposite. Um. They needed all the help they could get. So the second crusade was a response to the fall of Odessa. And it was interesting, part of the um. Process was getting people like the Templars involved. And that the Templars and the Hospitallers, the military orders, were another part of that response to the manpower problem. So you you get this kind of weird hybrid organizations created to create almost a standing army. So you get these, so they're monks, almost technically monks, so they're celibate, they're religious.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, they're probably Europe's most elite warriors. So it's a funny hybrid.

• 23:48Dan Snow?

  Funded from all over Europe. You send your donations in and it sort of keeps the keeps these orders in business.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's like an EU rapid reaction force, except nothing's rapid.

• 23:57Dan Snow?

  Yeah, and it's not a national force, it's a pan European.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:01Dan Snow?

  Uh, I've always liked the second crusade, um, because of the extraordinary. Uh, road trip that the King of France and his wife go on.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:09Dan Snow?

  Because the King of France takes his wife.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Big mistake.

• 24:12Dan Snow?

  He's a total loser. She's obviously quite tough and she goes, I'm not having it and they get divorced as soon as they get back. But you should always travel with your partner, I I think.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Well, you can make, we can come on to Edward the first later, that can work, can't, but you're absolutely right, it didn't in that case.

• 24:25Dan Snow?

  And second crusade achieve anything?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  It it tried to, it had good strategic conclusions at the end. Basically, uh, most, most of the Second Crusade couldn't fight their way through Asia Minor. So the French got cut up quite badly, but but some of them, some of them got through, including the king. The the Germans, including the emperor, got cut up very badly, um, but they did, some of them made it through. So so you find by the eleven, end of the eleven forties, they're in the Holy Land, they're in the the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was the main crusader state. And it's clear that they can't retake Odessa, you know, it's it's too far away. It's, it really is a bridge too far.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  So the local guys, the Franks, you know, the crusaders who'd settled down, married Arab women and and created these kind of colonial villages, um, persuaded them to attack Damascus, which is, as you know, is an old, old Christian city. If if the crusaders can recover Damascus, they've they've kind of broken out from the coastal littoral. And then you can have a proper colonial thing, you know, you can actually have fiefs for your knights. You can uh get, you can bus people in, they can start farms and and so on. So you actually have a lot more solidity to the kingdoms. Um, so it's strategically, it's, you know, great objectives, you can't, you can't fault the objective.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  But um, as always with the Crusades, it comes down to manpower. And you get this weird thing where the guys agreed to besiege Antioch, uh, sorry, Damascus. They head off there, they start their siege. But there are so few of them, they never actually encircle the city even. Um, so the whole time, there are guys, uh, reinforcements, volunteers, jihadists coming into Damascus, uh, bolstering the defenses and so on. So so in a sense, within a few days, the the Second Crusade gets to Damascus, uh, to besiege it. And they're the ones under siege, you know, they're they're stuck in the suburbs. They've got no real leverage militarily. And in fact, it's only the

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Common sense of the local, local Franks that gets them out and persuades them that they've got to go. You know, if, if we don't go now, we're not going at all. Um, and the local Franks get castigated for that, you know, as in, oh, you're traitors and you condescend to all this. But in reality, they saved the day, they just saved their lives. Yeah. But there is, is an interesting one because it's the first time you can see a real fracture between the different Christian communities. So you've got the kind of locals who are very multi-ethnic, very relatively tolerant actually, because most of the population are not Catholic Christians, they're other kinds of Christians. Um, and the, and the local crusaders and, and that is why crusaders are literally not that helpful.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  They, they're just basically tourists, you know, they come in, they don't really know how to fight when they get out there. They make a nuisance of themselves and then they go home. You know, it's like, what, you know, perfect. Yeah.

• 27:28Dan Snow?

  And, and they, okay, so, so no fundamental decisive result from the Second Crusade. There's plenty of decisiveness that occurs after that. We get Saladin, the great commander. He absolutely wiped the floor with the, the, the, the Christian states at the Battle of Hatton.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:46Dan Snow?

  And that, this is not, this is not during one of the Crusades, that's why I'm skipping along. But and in response to that catastrophe and, and, and then in the aftermath captures Jerusalem.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 27:56Dan Snow?

  That's a big moment.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, he does a huge amount. If you think the, uh, up to that point, there had been a whole country created. There was something like two hundred and fifty to three hundred, um, Frankish Polani settlements. You know, where there were the European guys with, with Arab women and you're into third, fourth generation by then. So a very mixed Christian rural community, lots of towns. And he just wiped them out. You know, the guys ran for it or were enslaved in, in the aftermath of Hatton. A lot of the guys were actually fighting at Hatton. It was a, a big Crusader army by their standards, but they were outnumbered and, and totally beaten.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  And then when Saladin got to Jerusalem, which we think of as, you know, this huge, easily defensible city. It, he took it very easily because it's a liability. And you, you find this, we'll talk about this more in a minute with Richard, the Lionheart, but. Jerusalem is the classic kind of temptation. It's a kind of honeypot. Everybody wants it because it's holy, it's got redolent. But it's landlocked. It's got almost, you know, very little water supplies. Um. And it's very, very difficult to defend. So Saladin is actually delighted that a lot of crusaders go there to defend it. Because he can just do all the difficult stuff, which is taking out castles and things like that. And then he can come back.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  And effectively, it's kind of like the, you know, the Germans in in the Channel Islands during the war. It was a fabulous way of keeping, you know, five divisions of the enemy.

• 29:31Dan Snow?

  Tied down.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Tied down, yeah.

• 29:32Dan Snow?

  So Saladin is racing across the homeland. He's he's getting rid of all these sort of crusader communities, these these local crusader communities. He takes Jerusalem, and that's when we get the Third Crusade.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, that's where you come into rapid reaction as well. So if you think, um. And again, this is the other tragedy of the Crusader states. Partly, it's about like a man.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  But it is also about time and geography. So so uh one of Saladin's cavalry armies can go across the whole of the the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in two days, easily. That's not not a problem. When the Battle of Hattin took place, you know, which takes a few hours to to wipe out the entire army. It it's nearly four years before a well-prepared, rapid-reaction force.

• 30:20Dan Snow?

  That's crazy.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  In the form of the Third Crusade can get back there. So you can be wiped out in an afternoon and and have to wait three or four years for for the response.

• 30:30Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  And the response when it happens um is surprisingly effective, actually. And again, it's sort of with hindsight, it's a bit of a tragedy, because if they just let it go at that point, you could say, okay, well, there wouldn't be another century of agony there. But but the guys, Philip of France, Richard of.

• 30:49Dan Snow?

  King Philip of France and King Richard of England.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:52Dan Snow?

  Despite constantly, well, fighting, but constant opponents of each other in in Europe, in France in particular, they set aside their differences and they march together, or they sail together.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  They they do, and it's not a not a happy cruise cruise ship.

• 31:06Dan Snow?

  No.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Kind of experience. These are, yeah, they're big personalities and they don't get on. There's there's. Permanent squabbling, but they overcome that temporarily. They get together with the local forces who have been besieging Acre, which is the last big remaining city. It's it's actually a much more important city than Jerusalem. Jerusalem sounds great, but it's it's important as an idea. Whereas Acre is actually a big, heavily defended maritime city, good links back to Europe. That's what you really want. And in practice, that has been the real capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. So they managed to recover that from from Saladin's garrison.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And then launch into a campaign against Saladin himself. Philip is kind of throws his toys out of the pram at those points.

• 31:55Dan Snow?

  King of France goes home and proceeds to immediately attack the lands of.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I know, what can you do?

• 32:00Dan Snow?

  I mean, scoundrelous, I mean, absolute terrible behaviour.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:03Dan Snow?

  And Richard the idiot stays out there, uh, wins a famous battle.

• 32:08Speaker 01

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

• 32:41Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Down the coast, shadowed by a fleet that could provide logistics. And it's the most fragile, cumbersome tactic to do. But he managed to do it. I mean, I don't think any normal medieval armies would even dream of doing that. And they wouldn't be capable of putting it into practice. But but Richard was a very, very good soldier and he had very, very good advisers. And Saladin, eventually his troops bounced into that that walking box when they got down to Arsuf, which is one of the um, old crusader castles on the coast and and was defeated quite heavily.

• 33:19Dan Snow?

  And so they, and then Richard gets his, he sees Jerusalem, doesn't he? And he turns, he's tempted, he marches all the way up there, the mountains. But he doesn't recapture Jerusalem, but he has to go back because obviously the French are attacking all his lands. Um, but he, they, it breathes a bit of life into the Crusader project in the Holy Land, doesn't it?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  No, you're absolutely right. I mean, in fairness to Richard, it isn't just, you know, he, he's not just acting selfishly. He's not, you know, he's not just running back because of the French. It's because all his advisors, all, all the smart money is saying, you know, you might be able to capture Jerusalem again. But how do we hold it? You know, because you've got to go home at some point. The Crusaders are just tourists and, you know, most of the, the local guys are now dead or enslaved. So again, it comes back to manpower and he took the right decision, which is the unromantic one of seeing Jerusalem, but not going for it. But that was the right thing to do.

• 34:15Dan Snow?

  But he's, there are a few castles in Crusader hands. There's, there's still a foothold in the Holy Land.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And that is, that is where the third crusade does well. It, it recovers a lot of the, the coast and the coast is vital because if you've got lines back to Europe, you've got logistics, you've got reinforcements, you've got volunteers and, and, and tourists. I mean, who bring money with them as well as weapons. So you've, you're going concern as long as you've got some of those coastal cities.

• 34:44Dan Snow?

  This is the point at which I completely lose the plot. I have no idea what comes next, but let's get, what, why and where is the fourth crusade?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Okay, fourth crusade.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Well, you're not alone in losing the plot here. I personally find 13th century difficult and depressing. You know, what can you do? You have a perfectly good 12th century, and then it's all goes to pot. The Fourth Crusade is a very sad one, actually, and one that's still very, very hotly debated. You get two schools of thought. Basically, it was a crusade that was being sent out to the Holy Land to provide help. So that was, and it's created by the papacy, like all crusades. It gets kind of suborned on the way. The Crusaders run out of money. The Italians who are doing all the shipping say, "Well, okay, guys, you can't pay us, but maybe,

• 36:08Speaker 01

  you know, I've got an idea. You can pay your way by, well, take a dito around to these Byzantines. We've got a Byzantine prince who's on our side. He'll maybe get us in there, and we can, you know, help ourselves to the piggy bank that is the old Byzantine Empire." And the papacy is very much against this. A lot of the Crusaders are against it as well, but they don't have any way forward. If they're going to cross the Mediterranean, they're going to do it in Italian ships. And here it's very divergent. You know, there are some people who say, "Well, the Byzantines, they're Christian. This is a complete perversion of the crusading ideal." And certainly, the Pope Leggett was against it, the Pope was against it, but couldn't stop it happening. On the other

• 36:50Speaker 01

  hand, there is a history of bad blood, including massacres between the Italian merchants, traders, and the Byzantines. So the Byzantines are not, you know, they're not Mother Teresa in this. They're not plaster saints.

• 37:01Dan Snow?

  No good, guys, here.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  No, it's all great.

• 37:04Dan Snow?

  But so extraordinarily, these Italians take this crusading army to Byzantium,

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:09Dan Snow?

  to Constantinople, and end up capturing it?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  It's weird on weird, isn't it? Yeah, how on earth did they do that? Because this is, you know, a city that is impregnable, really. I mean, they've been for centuries, and they've got the best battle lines. To me, it does show that the Crusaders were good soldiers. There weren't a huge number of them, but they did incredibly well. The Byzantines, you know, there was a lot of infighting, so that didn't help them either. But capturing Byzantium...

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Could have been, you could imagine that some of the guys might have rationalized it by saying, well, well, we're unifying the Christian forces around the Mediterranean. Once we've got Byzantium resources, then we can use that to to help the Holy Land. So you could see there was some kind of

• 38:01Speaker 01

  theoretical logic. In reality, it's all nonsense, you know, in in fact, it's actually very negative. It takes Byzantium as a military player out of contention. And and if you're a knight looking for a life in the in the Middle East and, you know, in the Eastern Mediterranean, suddenly you've got lands in Byzantium where you're not going to get a Turkish arrow in your neck, um, you know, that kind of thing. You have much more prosperity there. So it actually sucks away. A lot of the guys who would have been volunteering to go to the Holy Land and they go to the this new Frankish empire in Byzantium, which only lasts for a few decades anyway, before the the locals take over again.

• 38:38Dan Snow?

  So the so the Fourth Crusade accidentally ends up attacking a Christian power.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's.

• 38:44Dan Snow?

  And that's the that peters out after that. And as you say, it doesn't actually lead to a sort of rejuvenated Byzantium, taking the fight to the Muslims of the of the Mary Cape.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Quite the opposite.

• 38:52Dan Snow?

  Okay, quite the opposite. Let's get to that Fifth Crusade, still in the early thirteenth century.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So now now the the guys, I think if you take a slightly helicopter view, you can say the first half of the thirteenth century, the Crusaders are still in with a chance. You know, they've still got enthusiasm, they can occasionally field a decent army. And the Fifth Crusade is one of those cases where the big set of European armies got together, slightly piecemeal, and decided to to go into the Eastern Mediterranean. And bizarrely, to our eyes, they attack Egypt. You think, wow, what's Egypt got to do with it? And in fact, um, it looks stupid, but but it is clever. It's the right thing to do.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  All the way through the twelfth century, the the guys running Jerusalem understood that Egypt was the key. Because although it hasn't got all these kind of high profile, you know, it hasn't got the celebrity locations. But it's got cash, it's got the Nile, it's got fertility, it's the cash cow of the entire region. So if you control Egypt, you've got enough money to build armies to defend the Holy Land. It's sort of as simple as that. So the so the fifth crusade goes in to try and take the old European cities like Alexandria. And Damietta on the on the coast of Egypt. To help try and bring bring Egypt back into Christian control.

• 40:17Dan Snow?

  And it's a horror show.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  It's it is a horror show. Yeah, I mean, it goes on. There are some. That in a way that again, that's part of the problem. It goes it goes well for a while until it doesn't go well. So it goes well enough to encourage them to carry on in there rather than just kind of hitting it as a raid and then going. But again, it it peters out. They get given lots of opportunities and they get chances to be bought off, which they don't take because they want the big prize. And actually, with hindsight, that's maybe not such a bad thing. You know, again, if somebody offers you Jerusalem, that feels like it's. You know, you've done really well. In reality, what they're giving you is a poison chalice. You know, they're giving you a city that you'll put your resources into defending and then fail.

• 41:00Dan Snow?

  So if the Crusaders did manage to capture capture one or two of these cities on the coast, if they'd held on to those, that might have been interesting. But instead they get sucked into the interior and it's a hellish.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:10Dan Snow?

  This starving rump of the Crusader army is sort of wiped out and surrenders.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:15Dan Snow?

  Bad.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Not good. Yeah, absolutely.

• 41:18Dan Snow?

  Okay, so that's the fifth. What about the sixth?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  So the sixth, funnily enough.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Is strangely successful. It's one of those ones where.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  It's almost the opposite, like the Fifth has got quite a good army. But it just gets kind of sucked into this morass and can't do anything. The Sixth Crusade is when Frederick, who's fighting with the Emperor Frederick, is fighting with the Pope and is actually excommunicated. So you get this bizarre thing where an excommunicated person is running a crusade and the patriarch of Jerusalem won't talk to him and he's not allowed to talk to him. Hospitlers and Templars not allowed to play ball, you know, they do, but you know, they kind of have to be very careful what they do. So you have this guy who's really at odds with the papacy taking over. He doesn't have a great army. He's got a big job title,

• 42:14Speaker 01

  but he doesn't have a great army with it. But he's super clever and he actually has very good relations with the local Muslim players. Bizarrely, he gets on better with the sultans, but more than he does with the Pope. And he manages to negotiate quite big gains, you know, a recovery of significant parts of Galilee, gets Jerusalem back.

• 42:36Dan Snow?

  That's the weird thing, he actually manages to get Jerusalem without a battle.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Without a battle, this is diplomacy, this is, yeah, no, it's great. And then he gets, you know, the worst kind of mud thrown at him on the way out of town by the Christians, because he's an excommunicant. So it is one of these ironic things and particularly embarrassing for the Pope, because you'd think somebody excommunicated, clearly he doesn't have God on his side, but he delivers the goods. But the trouble is, you come back to the same problem. It's all very well to have a line on a map saying, I've got Jerusalem and I've got whatever. But if you haven't got troops on the ground, it's, you know, again, it's just one of those holding tanks.

• 43:15Dan Snow?

  So again, after that, the local Muslim states chip away and

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Dan Snow?

  and sort of the Crusader states shrink?

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:26Dan Snow?

  And then we are on the, are we on the seventh?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:29Dan Snow?

  We're on the seventh, right.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is Dear, Dear King Louis of France.

• 43:32Dan Snow?

  So that is the, halfway through, so we're late twelve forties.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:36Dan Snow?

  Okay, then what happens in this one?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, French, French do a really, really good, good sized crusade led by Louis the ninth. They, again, they go into Egypt, they've got the right objectives, they understand the, you know, the strategic overview. And they go in and do pretty well to start off with, um, until they over, overreach themselves. And again, start believing their own propaganda and the, the army gets sucked into a, a battle at Mansoura. Um, which is a town, uh, and crusader cavalry are not good in towns. Um, and you find the, the, the kind of headstrong French knights push into the town. Um, the Templars charge in two, Templars are actually really good, even in a town, they manage to ride all the way through.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Mansoura, do some good fighting and so on, but the secular knights, uh, get into trouble, as you can imagine, you know, a, a cavalryman in a, in an alleyway with people.

• 44:31Dan Snow?

  A French cavalryman in, in an Egyptian alleyway.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, exactly.

• 44:36Dan Snow?

  The mind boggles.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but anyway, so they, they were being cut down and the whole army pretty much ran from there. And then from there, it, it just goes downhill to, until eventually, horror of horrors, you have, you know, the French king himself taken prisoner. Um, and he's soon to become a saint, you know, this is like a real disaster. And the whole army is, is captured, the survivors are captured, they're being, uh, murdered at a rate of two or three hundred a day just to, you know, cut down the, the, the food bill. You know, it's an absolute nightmare and eventually a huge ransom is paid and, and Louis and, and his survivors draggle back into the Holy Land, into Acre.

• 45:16Dan Snow?

  Which is still just about in crusade hands.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  It is, it's still, it's still a holdout, yeah.

• 45:22Dan Snow?

  Right, so we got the eighth crusade.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:25Dan Snow?

  They don't take no for an answer, do they?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Well, again, this is Dear Louis, I mean, it really isn't, you know, on a very personal level, not taking no for an answer, so Dear Louis wanders back in.

• 45:35Dan Snow?

  So this is the same Louis?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Same Louis, yeah.

• 45:38Dan Snow?

  Tw- tw- fifteen years later or something, or?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is twelve seventy, I think he wanders into, um, this time, it's sort of the same idea, as in he goes into North Africa this time, you know, that, I, always, always reminds me of, um. Winston Churchill, you know, talking about the soft underbelly and the idea of attacking a

• 45:58Dan Snow?

  Still looking for it somewhere.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:00Dan Snow?

  There's bound to be a soft underbelly if you look hard enough.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:03Dan Snow?

  Right, so that's interesting. So again, they initially went straight for what we now know, you know, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon. Then they try Egypt. Now, so they've gone further up the coast of.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  So now they're going into the soft underbelly of the soft underbelly.

• 46:15Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Um, which is is great as a kind of literary flourish, but I think most strategic thinkers will say actually, mate, it's just words. It's not actually true. I mean, there was a thought that the that the local leadership might might become.

• 46:30Dan Snow?

  And where they're landing, what's of Tunis.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Tunis, Carthage, actually, where we're revisiting history. So they're landing Carthage.

• 46:37Dan Snow?

  They're now a lot, they're quite a long way now from the holy site.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 46:41Dan Snow?

  Okay, so they're in Carthage.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  So it does beg the question, even if they had been successful, what does this really achieve? Um, you know, and and that is, I think that is part of the point. They're kind of clutching at straws. You know, they're continually trying to solve this problem that you can't solve and not certainly not with the numbers of men they've got. So so Louis and his army, uh, start a siege, uh, Louis' son dies, then Louis dies.

• 47:05Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Um, the whole place sort of just collapses.

• 47:09Dan Snow?

  Disease.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:10Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, so it ends very sadly for for dear Louis, very pious guy, not not everybody's cup of tea. I mean, he, you know, uh.

• 47:19Dan Snow?

  So he he he spends, he's defeated in in the previous crusade. He was imprisoned. He's defeated again. He dies all on crusade in North Africa. Right.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:29Dan Snow?

  Okay, so.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  So at least he put his money where his mouth was. He you can't accuse him of not trying.

• 47:34Dan Snow?

  Yeah. And we're on the ninth crusade now.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really a little offshoot, really. And again, it's it's English. So we're we're back to Edward. So Edward, Prince Edward, later Longshanks, Edward the first.

• 47:46Dan Snow?

  So the Plantagenets have spat out one of their periodic good fighting princes.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 47:50Dan Snow?

  After Richard line up.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:52Dan Snow?

  So we had a couple of weak ones and now we got Edward, his head, your third son. He's a he's a warrior.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  He's butch. Yeah, he's he's the real thing.

• 48:00Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  So he goes back out there. He's trying to join Louis, but before he can get there, Louis is dead. And rather than turning around and saying, well, you know, job done, he, fairness to him, carries on and his. Crusade to the Holy Land, or his contingent is is called the next crusade. In reality, it's just a contingent of the other one, and that is the problem. You know, Ed Edward is personally a very good leader, as as we're about to find out, as you know, as you go into English history after that. But at the time, he had so few men. And when his guys got out there, you know, you.

• 48:35Dan Snow?

  And where are they? They've gone to.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Sorry, they've they've gone to Palestine.

• 48:39Dan Snow?

  They've gone.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, so the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, or the rump of it, which is basically a few seaside towns now.

• 48:46Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And his guys are so few in number and so ill-acclimatized that they just attack a couple of villages. Uh, half of them come down with dysentery. They literally, they say, we've we've been punished with hot food. They they blame the local.

• 49:02Dan Snow?

  Well.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Local curries or whatever, and.

• 49:05Dan Snow?

  Very relatable.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:06Dan Snow?

  Those delicate English boys, we can't cope with this.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  And they said they go back and and kind of they're just about to set off again. Where the the local Sultan, Bybars, sets a force of assassins on them. And and one of the assassins actually becomes um the godson of of Edward. Lord Edward, as he was then, a few weeks later, he becomes King Edward. Um, and enters his household and launches an a a surprise attack on him. I mean, it's really fantastic. So Edward is in his bedchamber with his pregnant wife next to him. He's he's unarmed, unarmored. Uh, we even know what he was wearing, or this kind of kingly underwear was. He was wearing um a kind of frilly shirt, a very loose shirt,

• 49:55Speaker 01

  and and lebri, which are kind of like uh trousers, like a um zwaive trousers, I guess. So he sort of wakes up a little bit sleepy to the knock on the door to see his spy, his his godson, who's a spy. Um, at the door. And instead of talking, instead of receiving intelligence from his spy, the guy just launches at him with a poisoned dagger. And Edward, being genuinely very butch.

• 50:21Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  This is like James Bond. He he sort of parries the blow down. The the poisoned dagger hits him in the hip rather than the chest.

• 50:28Dan Snow?

  Whoa.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Um. But instead of falling over and or shouting for help, um, Edred just punches the guy straight in the face, knocks him out, grabs the dagger and stabs him under the nose, straight into the brain and kills him instantly. So, yeah, I mean, you can see, I mean, to me, the real tragedy of that incident is that it allows Braveheart to be made.

• 50:51Dan Snow?

  Yes.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  But if only.

• 50:53Dan Snow?

  Crime against history, yeah, yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  But it was, it was good for England, I guess, because he, he made his way back home, became king on the way. Uh, Henry, his father, Henry the third.

• 51:01Dan Snow?

  Well, as my, my Welsh nine would say that it was a tragedy for all sorts of reasons. Okay.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:06Dan Snow?

  So that's the night, so the ninth crusade really is a very small little thing. Okay. We've now got for all that hard work and bloodshed and treasure, we've just got a few, as you say, seaside towns really, these castles on the coast. And eventually they're stamped out.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's kind of, you are reduced to the kind of, you know, Malle gates and Rams gates of, of the, of, of the Levant there. There's, there's one or two big cities that are really worth having, Tyre, um, and uh, Acre, uh, Antioch still exists until, well, until the twelve sixties. Um, but gradually all the crusader cities, all the lands are being taken out. And they really just exist as a, a set of small fragmented entrepots, really. They're there for trade because they're at the end of the Silk Roads. They actually serve an economic purpose for, for both parties, really, the Muslims as well as the Christians. But over time, that, you know, the trade routes gradually move.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  The idea of jihad grows and it's increasingly irritating having these kind of infidel, sort of, bits and pieces just left. In the same way as, you know, Hong Kong and Macau might be irritating to a, to a mature China. So, you know, as, as Islam grows in confidence, why would you, why would you have these infidels hanging out there? And then, um, so finally in twelve ninety one, they're, they're snuffed out and as, as Acre is put under siege and, and taken and, and destroyed. And, and the crusades, although the idea of crusading carries on after that, that's pretty much the end of it as a going concern. And as we can talk about maybe another day, it's the, it's redundancy

• 52:41Speaker 01

  for some of the big players, particularly the Templars who meet their match soon afterwards.

• 52:47Dan Snow?

  Amazing. That was impressive. Thank you very much for taking us through all those crusades. No, thank you. And you're going to come back on the podcast soon, so we'll see you then. Thank you, Dan. Looking forward to it.

• 53:16Dan 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.