406. Norman Conquest: The First Crusade (Part 6)

How did Normans from Western Europe reach as far as Antioch in what is now Turkey? What was their role in The First Crusade? Who was the Byzantine Alexios I Komnenos and how did he summon Normans to support his campaign? In the final episode of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined once again by Peter Frankopan, author of The First Crusade: The Call from the East, to discuss how Normans joined the first crusaders in the 1090s. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Charlie Rodwell Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  And me, William Derempel. And we have our old friend Peter Fragapand back again, talking about his, his very, very first book, and I think what was originally his PhD, The First Crusade, The Call From the East, which takes us even further from the familiar world of the Bay of Tapestry to the furthest frontier that the Normans reached, which is the Eastern Mediterranean, and ultimately a short-lived Norman principality in Antioch, a very, very, very long way from, from London and Hastings and, and rural.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  And can I just say, for those of you who enjoyed undoubtedly the pacing that we got in the last episode, I, I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't call it being duffed up. I like to think of it as, you know, when you go to a spa and somebody thrashes you with twigs for your own good. That's how I, that's how I think about it, having Peter Fragapand on.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  You're so mean to me, Anita. Anita's mum, please, please have a word with your daughter.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  No, leave her out of it. She's enjoying this far, far too much. Okay, so let us start, Peter Fragapand, with Manzakert. Now, tell us where, how and why Manzakert is important.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And why it's not all, you don't think it's all it's cracked up to be in many ways?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  I don't think anybody, well, look, Malazgert today is in sort of Eastern Turkey. It's usually called by, in, in England, Manzakert is a battle in 1071. It is a big deal insofar as there is a big set-to between the Byzantine, the Roman Emperor, Romanus IV, Diogenes, in 1071, where he fights a massive Turkish force under the command of Al Barzalan, one of the great Selchuk leaders, and is captured in battle. It's in 1071. History doesn't remember you generously if you get captured on the battlefield and you're a ruling emperor. There's no question about that. So it's significant. But no, in terms of its kind of later legacy, and you can listen to us on our Legacy Podcast

• 2:34Speaker 03

  talk about this, Manzakert has assumed a great significance in, in history, not just in, in Europe, but in, in Turkey too. I mean, it's celebrated every year in Turkey with literally hundreds of thousands, millions, millions of people take to the streets to celebrate, seen often as the birth of the Turkish state. So it's, it's significant for that reason.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Just, just to explain to people who perhaps haven't got their geography sharpened up.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Okay, you, you go, you go to Dover.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  You keep going, cross the channel and go east. Eventually you get past Italy, past Venice, you get to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, you keep going, heading towards China. And after about, after about a thousand miles, you get to the central plains of Anatolia and a place called Malazgert or, or Manzakert. So it's sort of a bit to the west of the Caucasus, but it's the kind of a gateway.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  You can't miss it, is what you're saying.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Ironically, ironically, you can miss it.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  You can miss it, exactly.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  You can, you can miss it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's one of, it's one of, of a series of routes that connects through from the hinterland of Anatolia in towards the, the great bowl of the Levant and, and to the plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So, but you, you can miss it. There are other ways of getting, getting through, but it's in what's now modern, modern Turkey and sort of the eastern part of it.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Peter, the reason that I'm very keen to focus our eyes on Manzakert at this particular moment in the series on the Normans is that among the troops there are not only former Anglo Saxons now working for the Byzantines, now part of the elite Varangian Guard, but also Normans from Normandy who've come via Italy. And this, and this character who's very interesting, I'd love you to tell me about, Rusel de Belhul, am I pronouncing him right?

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, or Russell Baelial.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Russell Baelial.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Or, or how he's known from all of our sources, Urselios, and which, you know, which, which if you're a Greek and a Roman speaker means bear. So he's a total bastard. I mean, he's one of the classic Normans who turns up and says, well, I can help you guys. The Normans that we talked about last time are, are a Western heavy cavalry is awe inspiring, and it's particularly useful against Turkish marauders, much smaller horses, very fast to gallop, but they're, but they are, they crumple in front of a heavy cavalry charge. So the, the Normans are really interesting from the Byzantine point of view. And if you can find people who you can hire and work for you, then there's a place for you.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And, and Russell Baelial gets brought in, in the 1070s to sort of stem the, stem the, the flow of small groups of marauding bands into Turkey that are very disruptive, they're embarrassing, and, and they, they, those pinpricks, they do draw blood. So he's brought in by the reign of Constantine Ducas, he takes over from Romanus IV. In fact, it's, it's Constantine or the Ducas family who orders the blinding of Romanus IV. It's not the Turks who do that because there's a transition of power. And the problems in Asia Minor are to do with a whole set of other paralyses that are facing the empire at, at the time. And so Rusel gets written about, and he's, he's important because of the other problems that the, that the empire's going to have with the Normans. But, you know, he, he doesn't particularly trouble the scorers.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  In, in the middle of the 1070s, there's a bit of chatter that he's thinking about taking the throne for himself, but you know, that's, that's the dark arts of propaganda where, you know, there's absolutely zero chance. But he's, he's, he's an effective military leader. He's a hard worker, and, and he's one of those people you want to have on your side rather than against you.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Then, then this man, Baelial, changes sides, Peter, and, and sets up his own principality right in the middle of Byzantine Anatolia.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  What he, he does is, it, it looks like he is trying to judge the odds of who's going to end up winning and figures that the, the Romans or the Byzantines are, are going to be on the losing side. So he makes it known that he's willing to bring his men over for the right, some right value and whatever. And principality means something different. That means that he has autonomy, that means he sets laws, that means he collects taxes. He's not that kind of person at all. There's no sort of, there's no sort of territory that he controls, but he, he's, he's, he's a blow in the wind. And the fact that he defects is a sign that, that, that, that, that the, the, the temperature is cooling on the Byzantines. And so this is a time of economic paralysis.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  There's been a shortage of, of economic growth, as Andy Burnham would call it. There's all sorts of pressures in other parts of the empire too. The ossification at the top has, has settled in over the course of the last 20 years. No one's been able to make good decisions. It's all, it sounds very familiar. The economy's in freefall. There's a constant devaluation of the gold, which is a sort of, don't touch that stuff in the typical Roman imperial world, because the state can't, can't pay its own bills. And so, so the fact that, that things are looking bleak means that Russell is, is a, Russell Baelial is, is a kind of, is showing which way things are going to move. And a young general called Alexios Komnenos is sent out to go and deal with him.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  And he beefs up his army by, by recruiting a few local bands that will prove reliable. Problem about local bands, as well as your own soldiers, they might defect at any time too, but he's able to capture Russell Baelial and bring him back in. And, you know, it's a bit of, it's a bit of apocalypse now, it's a bit of going to get Colonel Kurtz. So it, it, it's true, there's, there's a little bit around Russell Baelial of being a, a danger that you don't want him turning back on you, but, but he's not in, in any kind of meaningful way an existential problem, of which there are plenty facing the empire at this time. And Alexios is the kind of coming man who people are looking to, to think, you know, we need to have, we need to have a new, a new broom to come in and, and sweep some of the cobwebs away and make some of the difficult decisions that everyone knows they need to, to do.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Now, Peter, your first book was The First Crusade, The Call From the East. And we're now at that moment, and it is Alexios Komnenos who makes that call. Take us there now, because this is a very, very crucial point in world history. It's, it's, it's, everything in the next 200 years begins to change on this.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so it's, it's, it's a bit like taking a long run up to get into the sandpit. I mean, so my, my first sort of big work was a translation of the Alexiad, written by Anna Komnena. It's the first narrative history written in a European language by a woman.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Daughter of our mate Alexios.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Daughter of our mate Alexios, written in the 11, late 1140s, early 1150s. And Anna provides comprehensive history based on Imperial archives and other, you know, first-class materials about what is happening in this period from the late 1070s up until the First Crusade. And the pictures she writes, she's, she's, she's a writer. Her text has not been particularly well read. It's been dismissed by Edward Gibbon famously as showing, well, if you're, if you're a Byzantine historian, anyway, Edward Gibbon called it, says it displays on every page the vanity of a female author, which I'd have thought half your listeners will.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  So rude, no, you dig the gods.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  And yet so familiar, right?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Rude, yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  It gets dismissed by modern Crusade historians as being written by an old woman working in a convent, all the kinds of classical ways in which texts don't get read if they're a bit inconvenient. It's, it's written in incredibly elaborate, beautiful Greek, but amazingly, it's not written as the Times of London, as a fact-based report. It's, it's a work of literature, but it's also one that, that you need to understand the narrative arc of what it's trying to explain. But what happens when Alexios Takes the throne in ten eighty one as a young man, he's the, he has a wife from one of these powerful dynasties. So he solves a few problems by being acceptable to the elites. Is that he has to deal with three massive problems all at the same time. First, he's got the Turkish incursions in Asia Minor, which are not all that bad.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  They've become really bad over the course of the next fifteen years that I'll double back on. He's got Pechoneg or Patzinek, steppe nomads from Eurasia who have broken through the Danube defences. They've come all the way across from, from above the Black Sea and raiding in large numbers annually onto farms, lands, cities, towns in, in the Balkans. They're pre Mongol Turkic raiders. And then you've got our friends, the Normans, hello again, Robert the Weasel, Robert G. Scal, sounds better than Robert the Weasel, who has figured out that the, the problems facing the empire look like an opportunity. And if he plays his cards right, he could at least expand his realm from Puglia, from the southeastern part of Italy,

• 11:01Speaker 03

  across the Adriatic, across the Ionian Sea. But, you know, if things work right, he might even have a shot at, at probably not taking the throne. I don't think he's quite that ambitious or that naive, but he reckons if he can bring a field army close to the capital, he might be able to extract proper concessions, whether that's money, titles, you name it. But, you know, he can set, he can see the vulnerability. And in ten eighty one, he launches an expedition across the Ionian. He sets siege to the most important city on the empire's western flank called Diracion, what's now Dures in, in Albania. And then Sun sends parties out over the next couple of years into the interior. He, he goes back and forth a little bit to keep an eye on the main event back in Italy and leaves his son, uh, Bermond in charge.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Of whom we will hear more later, exactly.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  But that, that requires all of the oxygen in the empire to cope with because that, that threat is very severe and is recognised as such. So Alexius parks the Turks, does a deal with Suleiman, uh, probably opens up a few of the towns in Asia Minor. That has a consequence on that as a kind of price to pay, parks the Pechonegs for a while and then turns the full beam of what resources he has onto dealing with the Normans. And he does that quite successfully, but it takes him a while to work out how to do it. He makes a few mistakes, as you'd expect, nothing wrong with that. Not just because he's young, but because it's a difficult thing to do. He's got to bring with him, uh, uh, more money. So he, he starts melting down church silver that's not being used. That makes him a lot of enemies back at home.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  What are we now in the early ten nineties?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Early ten eighties. By ten eighty five, um, he's made himself the master of the situation. He pushes the Normans back. As luck would have it, Robert G. Scal dies. That helps, that buys him a bit of time. And then he turns to deal with the Pechonegs. And then, as we get into the early ten nineties, he's picked off two of those big problems. He deals with the Pechonegs at a battle called Lavunion, uh, at the end of April, ten ninety one. There are songs written about it afterwards, saying because of that, the Pechonegs never saw the, the, the, the, the month of May. And it's a massacre on a, an industrial scale, maybe even an epic scale, depending on whether you trust the sources completely. But then the big problem is, is Asia Minor. And there you've had the Turks who've started to now expand right up to the, um, northern shores of Asia Minor.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  And worse, they've also taken control of ports on the west coast. And the west coast, places like Smirna or modern Ismir, gives, is a kind of launchpad to knock out the Aegean. You could take out islands one by one. You can disrupt traffic, you've become a, a complete disaster. And so Alexius now faced with a problem is, how, how does he mop up those Turks? And he's now faced with a lot of disillusion within his own empire because his elites think that they've been spending too much money, too much time dealing with other problems. And what really matters are the Turks. And as I tried to argue in my book, one of the reasons why he parks Asia Minor last is that's where most aristocratic wealth and landowning is. And if, a bit like Putin with his inner circle, if your oligarchs feel some pain,

• 14:02Speaker 03

  that's not necessarily a bad thing for you if you're exposed. But by the mid ten nineties, the situation has turned truly desperate.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  And, and in that desperation, I mean, Alexius looks to the west, he says, help me, help me. I mean, i- i- is this the beginning of, of the first crusade, Peter, when he turns and says, I need you?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he looks everywhere. He, he tries to cut deals with the Fatimids in, in Cairo. He tries to cope and deal with Kiev, the Lernchenik of the sort of the great early Rus cities, where he tries to see if there's military help. But what is important is he needs two things. He needs heavy cavalry because they're super effective. And above all, he needs bulk. He needs a lot of people because the big targets that he needs to take, number one is, is Nicaea, uh, current Isnic, which is quite good, it's a striking distance to Constantinople in northern, in Bithynia, northern Anatolia. But then the big gateway cities beyond, you know, if he could get really lucky, Antioch and perhaps Jerusalem. So he starts to send increasingly desperate messages.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  He doesn't just send those to the Pope, but he does get in touch with the Pope, but he gets in touch with people like, uh, Robert of Flanders. Robert has done a pilgrimage to, uh, Jerusalem in the ten eighties and meets Alexis on the way back home. And Alexis says, look, I'm having a tough time. Any chance you could send me heavy cavalry? And Robert, when he gets back to Flanders, sends him five hundred knights. And so I've just been curating a big exhibition in Bruges where we, we've had lent, I think, first time I've ever seen outside the Vatican, one of only two images we have of Alexius in sort of full magnificence because of the connections that are made between, uh, Constantinople and Flanders. A hundred years later sees the rulers of Flanders sit on the imperial throne in Constantinople itself. But at this time, Alexis is sending out feelers to everybody.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  He's reaching out to people in, in England, he's reaching out to Anglo Saxons. There's a colony that gets established after the, uh, normal conquest of ten sixty six. Some Anglo Saxon nobles flee to Constantinople, looking for status and looking for jobs.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  That's what I want to know, is it a religious appeal or is it just purely, look, you know what? If you come and help me, I, you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. I mean, what is the transaction that is being offered here?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Well, the transaction is not, can you help me conquer Britain? The transaction is, look, I'm a man of status and wealth who's down on my uppers. Will I find a way of having my status well reflected? And in an imperial court in Constantinople, that's quite a high chance. And you're better chance there than pitching up in Palermo, uh, for example, where you go, I hate those Normans, look what they've done to us. But the big carrot that Alexis dangles is Jerusalem.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  And how quickly does this message get picked up by the Pope? Because this is the turning point, isn't it?

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Well, first, in the ten nineties, you don't need messages coming from Alexius to explain how dire the situation is. There's lots of, uh, of low levels and high levels of violence in the Holy Land itself. So pilgrimage to Jerusalem has been important since Jesus Christ died, was crucified and rose from the dead. But, but there, but this picks up with the, with the Islamic conquest, the Arab conquest of the six thirties, that that's, that pilgrimage more or less stops. But in the ten hundreds, it starts to become a kind of mass tourism business. You have lo- large pilgrimages of thousands, sometimes even perhaps tens of thousands of people going there because it's expensive to get to. It can be dangerous and so on.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  By the ten nineties, the conditions in the Holy Land and the routes across Asia Minor, and even getting there by sea, mean that people can't get there. So people are aware that there are problems in, uh, in, in the, in the Near East. People are aware from pilgrims coming back that this is hostile and it's dangerous more than normal. They are aware that the situation looks bad. And so those alerts, there's already chatter before Alexius primes it. But what Alexius does is he, he, he gets into, he reaches out to, uh, three or four of the big figures that he's got proper personal connections with, including people he's met in person. As happens, Robert of Flanders dies, so his son, very unhelpfully, is also called Robert, uh, gets in touch with too. But the Pope is the ace in the pack.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  And although we think of the Pope today as being the kind of single unifying figure in Western Christendom, at this time, there's a rival Pope who's probably more powerful than Urban. So Pope Urban is the Pope at the time, becomes Pope in ten eighty eight. In the mid ten nineties, he's so weak, he's not even able to get into the city of Rome itself, where Clement the Third, the anti-Pope, who's primary sponsor is the German Emperor, holds sway. And so when Alexius reaches out to Urban, he does so partly because Urban is well connected in southern Italy. But figures that Urban, as a man who has connections to Clooney and to France, will be able to galvanise more people. The lure that he gives to Urban is he says, if you can help me and we can make this work, there's a chance of church union.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  And Urban does that partly because he believes in it, obviously. But also he knows that if he can unite all of Europe, he might have a chance of securing his own position as the, as the sort of the true Pope. So there's a whole set of factors that come into this. You've got to pick through quite a lot of the wisps because the crusade turns into a machine of its own, where people then rewrite the histories afterwards, which is why reading the sources in Syriac and Armenian and Greek are really important and they usually get left to one side by that, the love of cavalry and chainmail that we talked about.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but not by you, Peter, not by you, not by you.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  That's why I'm a guest star on this week's episode. Please, please ask me to come back again. And, uh, but, but this is about settling lots of problems about the Council of Chalcedon, about the ways in which the church has been divided and maybe could be united.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  So, look, everybody has their own reasons, the wisps, as you put it. We're going to take a break now. Join us as those wisps come together and the first crusade begins.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Hello, Goalhanger History listeners. This is Marina Hyde and Richard Osman from The Rest Is Entertainment.

• 19:56Speaker 05

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• 20:10Speaker 04

  Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor?

• 20:14Speaker 05

  It's tempting to think of an actual traitor.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  A Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby, but then all of those are traitors who got caught.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Philby had a great run though.

• 20:23Speaker 05

  He did have a great run.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Yes, maybe. And probably sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well. So, so maybe there's, uh, there's some sort of equivalence. So if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday and Friday night at ten PM.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  There we are getting a statement from number ten on that flight with three hundred and fifty passengers on board. The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 21:05Speaker 07

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister, with high confidence, it was Russian.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War Three. They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  You've done nothing.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago. A frago that says to kill the president of Russia. Yes.

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• 22:30Speaker 01

  Welcome back. So the Byzantine Emperor has asked the West for soldiers and actually the response is something much larger than he could have anticipated. I'm guessing Peter Frankopan, because people respond, they respond in numbers for whatever their wispy reasons may be.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  So, look, I think that that's, it sounds logical that he's not expecting these large numbers, but in fact, all the routes are provisioned. The Crusaders are quite noisy, they're quite grumpy and they complain. And because of what happens, as we'll get to, they're very motivated to paint the Emperor and the Byzantine Empire in a negative light. But there's no complaints about provisioning along those routes, which tells me that water, food, supplies have all been thought through to cope with very large numbers of people. So the big rallying cry comes at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, where they've got a great epic set piece. If you're doing the Netflix version, the Pope stands up in a massive field in front of an enormous crowd and says, you need to stand up for your Christian brothers. We're being decimated in the East, in particular Jerusalem. You need to put down

• 23:34Speaker 03

  your grievances. You need to put your money to one side. You need to fight for your faith. It's a bit more prosaic. It comes at the end of a council where people have been talking about, you know, how to organise the church better. But what Urban does do is over the course of the following months, he leans in. He's travelling around all the time, visiting churches, lords, magnates, aristocrats, telling him to go and to head east.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Peter, there's this great cry, isn't there, at the end of the Council of Clermont, when the crowd surge and shout Deus le vult, Deus le vult, which is now a tattoo on the bicep of Peter Hegseth, the American Defence Secretary.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, which amongst all the other things, the use of the subjunctive is my favourite thing, that we have a United States Defence Secretary or Secretary of War, who might even know what that means. If he's listening, please let us know. I would love to do an episode of Guest Star with Peter Hegseth on Empire with you two, if we can get him. But it becomes a rallying cry going, God wills this. And that fervour gets moving all across Europe. And what Alexius has been very clear about is that he needs heavy cavalry and large numbers of men. And he needs that to disperse Turkish attacks and above all to capture heavily fortified cities, of which the first one is Nicaea. But because the excitement about Deus vult goes all around Europe, the first wave sets out too early

• 24:52Speaker 03

  before anybody's ready, led by a guy called Peter the Cuckoo, as he's called in the Greek sources, or Peter the Hermit, who's a kind of semi-mystic, semi-weirdo, who brings women, children and so on. And they start heading, marching towards Constantinople, chanting as they do so. And perhaps it won't surprise any listeners with a spoiler alert, that they get basically eliminated in short order. And then some of them carted off into slavery for their sins. The main branch of the Crusade, they head out with what looked like specific departure dates to help manage that provisioning process. Some march through down the coast of Croatia, some march down, some march through Italy on their way east.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  And when I was at college, I followed the route of Robert Kurtos via Bari across to what was ending in Slava, yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  And he is, he's a Norman knight. He's the current Duke of Normandy. As they pass Amalfi, Beowulf is busy trying to shake them down for spare change and to terrify them into, you know, buying him off. He, here's what's going on and thinks, right, maybe I should attach myself to this one. I get a bit of glory, that goes down well with the ladies. I mean, literally, that's what he's thinking. And I can maybe make myself useful. He's the younger brother of the Duke of Pulia. Spares and heirs don't always go hand in hand. So he figures, right, well, maybe I should just turn up. All these armies eventually start to converge on Constantinople. And that's a moment of huge vulnerability for the Emperor, because armies concentrated in one place, things can go wrong easily.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Well, sure. I mean, if you don't, if you don't look muscular enough, they'll, they'll fancy their chances, won't they? But Alexius makes them swear an oath. Tell us about, you know, that oath taking.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he's, he's, he's as worried, perhaps more worried about the people inside the walls than those outside. And the anxiety is not that you get some, some unshaved hairy man from Northern Europe who suddenly thinks, oh, this looks nice, maybe I'll have a go. It's the, it's the groups and elites who have been busy whispering against Alexius, activate them and promise them the earth in return for their military firepower. So Alexius does, does, does three things. First, he makes sure they get, they get ferried across the straits of the Bosphorus, so they're out of striking distance, out of harm's way. Second, he makes a great effort to meet them all personally. He breaks off the leaders from their men. So he controls access into the city to make sure that the risks are low. And then he makes them swear solemn oaths to him. And those oaths that are sworn

• 27:16Speaker 03

  over religious vows are not done in the classical Roman Byzantine style. They're done in an intelligible, legalistic way that makes sense to these knights who are from the same sort of chivalric world in the Western style, where he, they formally become his liege man. That has a set of specific legal implications. And he makes them all promise that whatever they capture, they'll hand back to the Empire. And that's a perfectly logical thing, because once they've done that, they're all going to obviously go back home, because why would you stick around? Right? Well, what's the point? But also, he wants to make sure that his personal security is going to be guaranteed. So that solemn oath is seen as being an important thing. It's recorded in all of the Western sources as well as in the Greek ones. Some

• 28:00Speaker 03

  of the rulers bristle at the idea that they're going to become somebody else's pash and somebody else's sort of little helper. And so they resist it, but he's able to squeeze them into doing it. He's able to explain, there's nothing personal, but that there are reasons for it. And they all, they all do that. The troops then arrive in Nicaea and Alexius turns up to watch the action and goes, right, this is going to take a few months. You're going to need to build assault siege engines. You're going to need to stop anybody getting in and out. There's a lake to one side that makes Nicaea a little bit leaky, but we've got to squeeze them into submission. He then sends messages inside to the Turkish governor, saying, look, we can do this one of two ways. And I would definitely pick the easy way, because it will end badly for you. To which the Turks say, are you

• 28:43Speaker 03

  joking? Have you seen the size of these walls? Have you seen how high they are? No chance. We're going to be impregnable. Plus, by the way, look at how many people there are outside the city, how you're going to feed them, keep their horses pastured. They might be able to put up a decent show for a few weeks, but at due course, they're going to disperse. But that's what, that's how, why castles are so important. To Alexius's amazement, the Crusaders start chopping down trees and building siege engines and they storm the city. And he doesn't think this is even going to be possible. And within a matter of days, Nicaea is turned over and turned over to Imperial, to his hands.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  To his hands, not the Crusaders. And that's going to be important, right? It's going to, because that's going to annoy people who've, who've left their homes, left their businesses, been promised the world, you know, chopped down trees, have made siege engines. And hang on a minute, you know, are we being, are we being circumvented here?

• 29:36Speaker 03

  I mean, look, if you've got a grievance, you've got a grievance. I mean, if you think about the other way around, and you've come from, let's say you're a non-royal lord or a non, you know, and you think, right, well, I'd quite like to be the governor of a town in, in Asia Minor. You've got to, you're not speaking the right language. You know, the day-to-day humdrum of walking around to check in the breaders being baked properly and charges paid right, you know, that's all that exciting. And the Crusaders are quite realistic, that they understand that these big targets are important to provide a supply chain that will link further eastwards as well. And that they need to be in Christian hands. But none of them are thinking at this point that there's value in, in trading what they've left behind to be a provincial governor. Some are thinking about imperial service. Maybe they could be a general. Maybe they could become an aristocrat. Maybe they could

• 30:21Speaker 03

  marry the daughter of a well-to-do Byzantine and have a comfortable life. But, but most of them are thinking about getting to Jerusalem. So having seen what they do in Nicaea, Alexius goes, right, the next target is Antioch. And Antioch is an even more formidable death star. It has been in Byzantine hands until the 1080s. It's been, they captured about 120 years earlier. And its fall is one of the kind of great pillars being taken out of the fortifications of their eastern frontier. So recovering Antioch is an absolute primary essential goal. And the Crusaders spend the best part of a year camped outside in conditions that start okay and deteriorate very quickly. People start eating the seeds from horse manure.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  They get picked off from archers in the towers, the army sent to harass them from behind. They're on the brink of oblivion repeatedly, but they don't break the siege because they, I mean, they could just carry on to Jerusalem. That's where, that's where they're aiming for. They don't do it because of these oaths they've given to Alexius. And because they recognise Antioch as a sort of bulwark city. When they eventually break in in ten ninety eight through, you know, turning, turning one of the borders, one of the, one of the tower guards, Armenian called Firus, who lets, lets them in, even though they get into the city and capture it, they then face the next problem, which is they're going to get attacked from outside, where, where a new Turkish army comes to rub them out. So they look like they're going to get destroyed all over again.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Right. And, and also, I mean, in the, in the interim, while they're eating the seeds out of horse manure, some don't stick around, you know, oath or no oath. I mean, notably Peter the Hermit or Peter the weirdo, as you like to call him, he's off. I mean, they, they just decide, right, I've had enough. So that leaves them looking quite vulnerable.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Some do leave, like Stephen of Blois, who goes to get relief from Alexius and meets him at Philomenian in, in, in Central Asia Minor, and tells him that the Crusade army is on the brink of annihilation. And Alexius then has to do a calculation, which is, is it worth throwing good money, good men after bad? Should he march to the aid of a lost cause? Or should he stick still? And just because the Crusaders at Antioch, it doesn't mean his other problems have, have gone away. But that decision not to advance becomes the kind of the grievance around which Bermond in particular is able to capitalise. And it's one of the reasons why the Byzantine Empire gets, has its reputation besmirched. But, but, but the Crusaders at Antioch, there's no two ways about it.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  The heroism, the, the tenacity, the, the flirting with disaster on, on an epic scale repeatedly before its conquest makes this one of the great military campaigns in medieval history.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Now, Peter, you mentioned twice now this, this figure, Bermond. Tell us about him. He's a giant and he's, he's one of the people that most fascinate, but also horrify your, your favourite historian, Anna Kamina.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Well, he's an asshole. I mean, he's a, he's an absolute bastard. I mean, he is, he's selfish, he's vain, he's quite talented, he's a cunning, he's, he's a cunning so and so. And he's a duplicitous, oath-breaking, bete noire that the emperor has. I mean, he's already been a thorn in the side of the ten eighties, where he effectively ends up under-delivering. I mean, for all of the kind of marauding raids he does into the interior during Robert the Gisgus campaigns, he actually goes back between his tail and his legs. He comes to Constantinople with the Crusaders and it's not really what someone like this is that keen to see.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  And he, he tells Alexis, he's very willing, if a point, if, if, if Alexis would be so willing to take command of all of the Byzantine armies, I mean, the, he's willing to take control of all of the empire's eastern armies if Alexis would be minded to appoint him to that position, to which you can imagine Alexis's response. When he gets to Antioch, he figures, right, I've got a perfect storm of propaganda that's going to work. This has been a big target that's take, cost a lot of lives, a lot of men and a lot of energy. So when the Crusaders head on to Jerusalem, which is their primary target, which they end up taking in June ten ninety nine, Bermond doesn't go with him. So the oath that he's given to get to Jerusalem, he doesn't fill that one. He's promised to give stuff back to the Byzantines.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Where the Byzantines turn up and say, look, you need to hand this over. Bermond says, I don't think so. In fact, the people who've broken the oath are you, because you didn't come to march our aid. And although there are a few Byzantines fighting along with us, we're the ones who suffer blood and, and losses in return. So Bermond starts to mount a very specific dark arts campaign, a propaganda, particularly with a text called the Geste Francorum, which is a sort of widely circulated, because it's a bestseller in Europe in the early eleven hundreds, that casts Bermond, it becomes, it casts Bermond as the great hero, always a step ahead of everybody else. And Alexius as a, as a man who is always going to be double-crossing everybody he meets. And Bermond eventually gets squeezed in Antioch.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  And it's, it's a great story. He then, he then has to get back to, he wants to go back home to Southern Italy.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Just, just before we go there, so he does establish in Antioch, another Norman principality. So we've seen in the course of this series, these, you know, first of all, Normandy, then Britain, then South Italy and Sicily. Now there's a new one in Antioch, which is specifically run by this, this Norman, Bermond.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's basically a city-state. So it, it, it takes over all the existing administration. He has got no people who are bureaucrats and know what to do. So he, he keeps everybody in place. And at this point, it's, it's not quite clear exactly what status it would be. Principality is what it becomes with the Prince of Antioch. And that's, that's an upgrade on Bermond as the, as the bastard son of Robert the Weasel, who doesn't have a fancy title. These things, they, they do matter a bit, but more important is, do you have power and wealth and authority?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Okay, but it matters a little bit. So the, the stories about Bermond, I mean, as you say, there's books written about him as propaganda. There's also sort of propaganda running the other way that, you know, he was, he was a savage bastard who spit roast Turkish prisoners in the full view of, of the Turks and, and, and he did that to create terror. I mean, I know that, I think we did Runciman before, didn't we, if memory serves right, William? I mean, is this something that he really did? Or he wanted people to think he did, or his enemies wanted people to think he was this savage? I mean, where does that story come from?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  I, I think, I think all, all of that, I think the question is who's writing it for what audience, when, and so on. But, you know, Bermond does, what he does understand is he does understand the value, I suppose we'd call it, of his own brand. And he understands that once the Crusaders have got to Jerusalem, and they're then stuck working out, well, what do we do with this place? We all quite like to go home. Who's going to stick around? If, even if we can find a few who stick around, like, like Godfrey of Bouillon or Boulogne from northwestern Europe, agrees to become not the king of Jerusalem, but to become the guardian of the Holy Sepulchre. His, his brother doesn't have too many problems. He takes over and takes the royal title. Even if you can leave a few people behind, how you manage it, how you protect it

• 37:30Speaker 03

  becomes a different challenge. And the Crusaders are stuck thinking about how do they solve this? One obvious answer would be hand it over to the Byzantines and let it be their problem, but they, they choose not to do that. Bermond understands that this offers him an opportunity to maximise his own fame, glory and so on. So in, in the early eleven hundreds, he thinks he should expand his territory in, in Antioch. He gets, he gets captured by the Turks because he's not as good at his job as perhaps he thinks he is. He then gets ransomed and to get back home to spread the message about how glorious he is, he disguises himself in a coffin with, surrounded by dead chickens, where he lets it be known that he's been killed and the putrid smell means that no one opens the coffin

• 38:12Speaker 01

  clever.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  to take a look. He then gets back home and, and he's then, he's the Harry Styles or the William Dalrymple, the Anita Arne of, of the early 12th century. Everyone's talking about him. Everyone wants to know what it was really like. And did he really spit roast people? Did he really murder on this scale? Did he really get the better of the emperor? How come he's so handsome? How come he's so good looking? How come he's so wonderful? And he becomes the single most desirable man in Europe, to the point that he gets married off to the daughter of the King of France. And that's from Bermond's point of view, is a very, very good outcome.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  It's a good outcome. He's, he's born a bastard, the younger son, and now, now he's got the King of France's daughter.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Being Bermond, he thinks, right, do I fancy heading back to Antioch, which is quite a long way away? And trust me, I've been there before.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Quite hard work.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Maybe I can use all of this to mount yet another campaign on the western flank of the empire, wobble that loose Byzantine tooth, make myself the master of Epirus and maybe beyond. And if nothing else, I'd be able to get extra, extract value, titles, names, glory, money from Alexius, who is his, his bete noire. So he gathers together everybody he can. He badmouths the Byzantines, saying, look, we fought one campaign to defeat the infidel in Jerusalem. This one is about the Antichrist, about Alexius, who's a schismatic, he doesn't worship in the right way. These guys are all super dodgy and people believe him. All that propaganda goes down quite well. The fact that he's able to say Alexis didn't pull his weight in the first crusade.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  And, and, and then that, that gets picked up by papal sources that go, maybe we should just drop that story of Alexius too. Maybe we should make this a papal thing. It was, it was Urban's campaign that made this all happen. And it's about the power of papacy, which becomes super valuable in the Middle Ages and much later too. And so Bermond then crosses over to the same place, to Diracchio. And this time Alexius is waiting for him, knows how to deal with him, traps him, bleeds him dry, and then makes him sign a humiliating peace treaty that's included in, in full in, in, it's called the Treaty of Devil or Diabolus in the Alexiad, that sets out all the terms that are crucial, you know, that are excruciating for the Normans and for Bermond, including that Bermond's broken his oaths, that he's behaved badly, that, all the rest of it.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  And unfortunately, the problem for Alexius is that he dies a couple of years later. And by this point, nobody cares, because they're looking at Antioch, they're, they're where, where Bermond's nephew Tancred is now in charge, looking at the Holy Land, thinking about how wonderful it is to be in a world where men have served with honour. And Bermond becomes an important, becomes a useful tool for everybody. But the, the price to pay for all of this is the reputation of Alexius personally, but also of the Byzantine Empire as a whole. So he, he, it's, it's, he opens Pandora's box. And I suppose the question for us Byzantine historians is, was that a price worth paying? Was the first crusade, despite everything that follows? And the answer is, is that, is that Alexius was in a kind of Zelensky-like position

• 41:08Speaker 03

  in the mid ten nineties, very, very few options, running out of road very quickly and possibly the lesser of all evils. But the reputational damage was catastrophic and Bermond exploited that cynically, deliberately. And, and, and that's why he's not well-regarded in the, by Anna Kamina or, or by others. And she's got a difficult balance because she, because if her father's going to have a bete noire, he can't be a moron. He can't be an idiot. So she's got to, she's got to glamour up a bit to say he's got some qualities. Because if you see off a rival, they've got to be reasonably adroit. But, you know, he, he comes about it as a scheming, untrustworthy, untrusting cynic, who's, who's after it just for himself. And I think that's, that's pretty much how things were.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Peter, nonetheless, it's an extraordinary life, Bermond. And it ends in a small town in Puglia. We, we have his extraordinary tomb in Canosa di Puglia. I went to see it a couple of years ago. And you're in the middle of Italy and yet this tomb looks like a Sufi saint's shrine somewhere in the Middle East. It's got a shallow dome. It's also got these extraordinary bronze doors that are among the finest surviving in medieval Italy. And inside, there is this tomb with this Latin inscription naming Bermond. So Peter, Bermond has had an extraordinary life and for all the fact that he dies in Italy, he has established a principality in Antioch that survives 200 years. It is the furthest reach of Norman power to the east.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it depends how you define Norman Antioch, but you know, I suppose 1268 would be the kind of classic point. But yeah, it's, it's, it's an outpost and it does what Normans love to do, which is they love to have a springboard so that they're ready to be there opportunistically in case anything else offers itself as an opportunity. And that, that is, again, that, that can sound like, I mean, that in a negative way. I mean, that, that is what politics, power, business is all about, is to make sure you're in the right place at the right time. And the Normans, I suppose, if you join up the Battle of Hastings, the conquest of Britain, expansion into Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, you see how people like Russell Balyol in Asia Minor, the Normans in the First Crusade,

• 43:20Speaker 03

  but also in Antioch particularly, you know, they're always alive to what opportunities look like. And again, that, that is, that is like the British in the Age of Empire. So it's, it's true, they don't get any further east because to, to make things work, you need to be thinking about the boring stuff like supply chains and logistics and ports and harbors and how you get material and above all people to come and run your business for you. Antioch doesn't offer, it offers a huge amount of prestige and it is an important city. It's a, it's a great trading outpost that connects into land routes and salt roads heading eastwards and of course through into the Red Sea and into the Gulf. So it's, it's an important metropolis.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  So, I mean, look, we're in the final moments of this, this podcast. We came to this because of all the hysteria about the Beowulf tapestry, because everybody here in Britain is beside themselves with the excitement about the Beowulf's tapestry being here. But are you saying, actually, as far as the Normans go, this is pretty weak tea. It's a small story compared to what, you know, the Normans did.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  All this glamorous stuff further east.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the east.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Some of my best friends in Norman history, some are, some are involved with the, with the exhibition. I think it's, it's not to, it's not to belittle Beowulf or the Normans in Britain, but it's to put them in a, in a, in a wider context. And that what's happening in the British Isles has important, not parallels, but has important chapters that are also playing out in the central Mediterranean and the eastern Mediterranean too. And so we can't just think of the Normans as arriving across the channel and then flowing northwards. Those connections, those ambitions and how that world is being seen, you know, great, great authors like Audre C. Batales are working in Normandy in the 1120s, is incredibly well informed about Constantinople. I mean, literally has, has snippets of gossip that I don't pick up from any contemporary local sources in Constantinople that shows these

• 45:09Speaker 03

  connections spreading out over thousands of miles. And I think that shows that the Normans have this field of vision that, that unite the back to Scandinavia too. So, so it's, it's about putting them in the, in the, in the wider field than just what happens in Pevensey Bay.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Peter, as always, it is, oh no, it is wonderful. There's just no two ways about it. I, I love having you on. It's fantastic. It's invigorating. I feel like we've done a marathon. I feel healthy for it. I like it. It's good. Come back. But you know, we're, we're going to talk about that Beowulf tapestry in more detail in a bonus episode here on Empire. So thank you very much for listening to our Norman conquest series. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  And goodbye from me, William Derimpel.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Hello, Goalhanger History listeners. This is Marina Hyde and Richard Osman from The Rest Is Entertainment.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  Hello, everybody. Every Thursday and Friday, we are reacting to the pop culture phenomenon that is The Celebrity Traitors. We'll be on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And Marina and I are digging into all the castle's twists and turns, giving our expert opinion on what should happen next.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Now, which historical figure do we think would be the greatest traitor?

• 46:28Speaker 05

  It's tempting to think of an actual traitor.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 05

  A Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby. But then all of those are traitors who got caught.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Philby had a great run though.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  He did have a great run.

• 46:37Speaker 04

  I think he could probably see off, you know, Joanne.

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Yes, maybe. And probably sort of where he ended up in Moscow is probably roughly like where the contestants have to spend every night as well. So maybe there's, there's some sort of equivalence. So if you're watching Celebrity Traitors, don't forget to tune into our reaction episodes every Thursday and Friday night at 10pm.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.