Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Mongols and the Fall of the Crusaders About this episode In the mid‑13th century, the Mongols seemed unstoppable until a former slave‑soldier stood in their way. Mamluk Sultan Qutuz of Egypt defied an empire that had crushed Baghdad and Syria, and began the beginning of the end of the Crusader States.
Matt Lewis and Nicholas Morton uncover how Mongol conquests shattered the Crusader world, set Louis IX’s doomed crusade in motion, and paved the way for the Mamluks to end the era of the Crusader states forever.
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Mongol Empire
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Genghis Khan's Pax Mongolica
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Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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Transcript 16,554 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:40 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gob-smacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
1:21 Matt Lewis? The year is 1260. It's the height of summer, and as the sun glares over the desert sands of Egypt, four envoys, mounted on horseback, bear down on the ancient and fabled city of Cairo. They've been sent to deliver a message to the new Mamluk Sultan Qutuz, a former slave soldier who's risen from bondage to seize the reins of power along the Nile. But the letter they bring is not filled with fair tidings, fawning rhetoric, or diplomatic niceties. Instead, it warns of a coming storm so bleak that all in its path tremble with fear.
2:01 Matt Lewis? You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness of your god, and then we will kill your children. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Though this is the age of the crusader, the storm doesn't rise from the coastal fortresses of the barbarian Christians, nor from the citadels of capricious Syrian sultans.
2:40 Matt Lewis? It hails from the steppe, the vast grassland of the far north, home to countless nomadic horsemen. For these envoys are Mongol. They foretell the onset of a Mongol tide, and making good on threats of apocalypse and catastrophe is their speciality. Before arriving on Egypt's doorstep, the Mongols have already crushed the last vestiges of Seljuk resistance in Anatolia, overrun the mountain fortresses of the Nisari assassins, and ransacked Baghdad, the longstanding jewel of the Sunni Muslim world. For Qutuz, all portents point to more of the same.
3:21 Matt Lewis? The Mamluk Sultanate stands square in the sights of a 12,000-strong legion of horsemen ready to strike at the first sign of resistance. Yet in the summer of 1260, resistance is exactly the path Qutuz and the Mamluks choose. When the Mongol envoys present their demands of uncompromising imperium and unconditional surrender, Qutuz responds in a language the steppe nomads no doubt understand. He orders the four ambassadors imprisoned, then publicly cut in half. Their severed heads are skewered on the ramparts as feed for carrion, a fate usually reserved for petty criminals.
4:02 Matt Lewis? It serves as a declaration that Qutuz will not be following the precedent set by his Near Eastern neighbours. Instead, he's ready to pick up his sword, face the Mongol wrath, and take his chances at war.
4:21 Matt Lewis? The shodown takes place near an oasis named Ain Jalut, and is more than just a battle. It's a defining struggle between two rising superpowers for control of the eastern Mediterranean. The crusaders, watching from behind the walls of their shrinking coastal kingdoms, are little more than spectators. But they won't remain so for long. The victors, be it Mongol or Mamluk, will turn their focus on to them next, and the last embers of Latin Christendom in the Holy Land will be extinguished.
4:56 Matt Lewis? Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. For the past two weeks, we've journeyed across the vast expanse of the medieval world, tracing the turbulent saga of the Crusades. For almost two centuries, these so-called holy wars set Christendom's warriors against the Muslim powers of Egypt and Syria, each fighting for dominion over the scorching deserts and sacred sites of the Holy Land. Endorsed by the papacy and waged by Western knights in unforgiving lands, the Crusades reshaped the course of the Middle Ages. This is an epic saga of faith, ambition, and blood.
5:38 Matt Lewis? In our last three episodes, we've charted more than 150 years of history, tracing the course of the Crusades from their explosive beginnings in the 11th century through to the legendary campaigns of the Sultan Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Along the way, we've witnessed lurid and infamous episodes unfolding across medieval Christendom, and discovered that this is far more than a straightforward tale of clashing kings and civilizations. If you haven't listened, do go back and dive into those episodes. Today, though, we come to the endgame, the fall of the Crusader states. And yet, the Crusaders themselves have very little to do with it.
6:22 Matt Lewis? The crisis that envelops the Holy Land from the year 1240, and which eventually culminates in the abandonment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291, is shaped not by popes or Western armies, but by those in Cairo and on the steppe. The Mongols crash into the Near East, Jerusalem falls again in 1244, and the Crusaders are shocked into one last Hail Mary, the Seventh Crusade, led by French King Louis IX. Out of the chaos rises a new power, the Mamluks, who steadily dismantle the Crusader world until nothing remains. To help us navigate this final tumultuous chapter of crusading history, I'm joined by
7:06 Matt Lewis? historian Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Near East. And once we've traced the global story of the fall of the Crusader states, stay with us, because Eleanor is returning to help me reflect on the legacy of the Crusades, and what this 200-year experiment ultimately left behind.
7:36 Matt Lewis? Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Nick. It's great to have you with us again.
7:39 Speaker 01 It's great to be back on the show. Thanks so much, Matt.
7:41 Matt Lewis? I think we thought at this point, we know we're heading towards Seventh Crusade, seventh in our numbered crusades, and we're going to bring in the Mongols here. So we were thinking, who can we talk to about Mongols and Crusades? And it's, of course, it's Nick Morton. But I wondered if you could help us out, just to give our audience a little bit of a recap. So we're about to hit the Seventh Crusade. In broad terms, what's been going on in the Holy Land for the past couple of hundred years?
8:07 Speaker 01 Okay, so a lot is the answer. Essentially, you're looking at an incredibly complex and fragmented landscape. You've got major empires and territories around. So going back to around the year 1000, for example, you have the Byzantine Empire in the North West, which controls much of what will be modern day Turkey, or Anatolia as it's known then, as well as the Aegean in Greece. And then the remainder of much of the Middle East is made up with various different Arab or Kurdish leaders, who are all under the authority of the Abbasid Caliphate. And then in Egypt, you have a separate Shia Caliphate.
8:50 Speaker 01 In the following years, then, though, you've got a massive invasion out of the Central Asian steppe region. This is the invasions of the Seljuk Turks, and they conquer the entire region during the 11th century, or the greater part of it, anyway. Soon after that, you have the advent of the Crusades and the foundation of the Crusader states in the coastal regions of the Near East. And then about a little over 100 years after that, you have the advent of a new set of invaders with the rise of the Mongols. So we're looking at a very complex region. It was already complex before all these various invasions, but it becomes even more so, not
9:33 Speaker 01 just because of the invaders themselves, but because of the various other peoples they set in motion. And for me, that's what makes this period so incredibly fascinating. You've got all these different cultures, fighting wars, conducting trade, encountering each other for the first time, whether that's peoples whose history in the Middle East goes back for centuries, or who are relatively recent.
9:56 Matt Lewis? Because I mean, there is a danger, isn't there, of seeing this period of, that we call the crusading period and Crusader states, and we often frame it as very much Christianity against Islam. But there's so much more going on. I think what your work is really great at highlighting is the fact that there are just almost innumerable facets to this, different cultures, different civilizations, different groups, even within Christians and Muslims, and as well as those alongside them. There is so much more going on than just thinking about it in terms of Christians attacking Muslims in the Near East.
10:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's the complexity of the landscape for me is what makes it so interesting. You've got the Byzantine attempt to try and restate their authority in Anatolia. You've got nomadic peoples struggling against agricultural peoples. You've got interfaith rivalries and rivalries within a faith. And there's many occasions when you've got Christians and Muslims on both sides of the battlefield. Or where the battlefields involve neither Christians nor Muslims, because ultimately you've got peoples like the Mongols, who in their early years, at least when they're first invading the Middle East, their beliefs for the most part centre on shamanistic Central Asian practices.
11:12 Speaker 01 So yeah, it's a very complicated but fascinating area.
11:16 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. And as we head now into the 1240s, I mean, we all ought to hide, hadn't we? Because the Mongols are coming. That's a pretty scary moment for anybody. If anyone told me the Mongols were coming, I would be out the door like a shot. I wonder, I mean, another unfair question for you here. I've given you two really unfair questions to start off with. Summing up the crusading period quickly, I wonder if you can kind of sum up for us who the Mongols are, where they come from, and how they become such significant players by the 1240s?
11:45 Speaker 01 Okay, so as I've said, this does happen from time to time. And it is a feature of Eurasian history that there is, are these sudden invasions out of the Central Asian steppe region. There can be centuries between them. But I think most people will have heard of, say, the Huns invading the Eastern Roman Empire, or later invasions such as the Magyars, for example, or the Seljuk Turks I've already mentioned, or indeed the Mongols. But the Mongols themselves, or the Moal people, they began in what would be sort of the northern parts of modern day Mongolia, very much on the borderlands where the steppe, sort of the wide grassland areas, move into the coniferous forest belt of the far north.
12:32 Speaker 01 And in their origins, they may not have been solely nomadic. Researchers have suggested that they may have actually have roots that go back to the communities who lived in the forest. But they're in a highly complex and very hostile landscape. There's lots of different political factions and different peoples in Mongolia, as we'd call it today. They're all struggling for ascendancy. And Genghis Khan, or Chinggis Khan, as he's more accurately known, he's born into a faction that suffered a great deal very recently. And he himself is imprisoned at an early point in his life. And the story of the rise
13:11 Speaker 01 of the Mongol Empire really is very much tied to Chinggis Khan's life. I've often wondered, maybe it's because of the extreme uncertainty and suffering of his childhood, that really, as soon as he's able to, he pushes and carries on pushing to expand and expand and expand. I wonder if there's a search for security somehow in that. But attacking neighbouring peoples, he doesn't always win, but he wins enough. There's no stopping him. Until eventually, once you get to the early 13th century, he begins to try and expand outside Mongolia, having conquered all the various peoples within Mongolia.
13:51 Speaker 01 He wages war into northern China. In the 12 teens, I think it's 1218, he begins his advance or begins his approach on the Middle East with an attack on what's called the Quarasmian Empire, which controls much of, well, it's Persia then, it would be modern day Iran and many of the regions neighbouring the step from there. He also expands into Central Asia, what we would call today Russia, and ultimately into Eastern Europe, until of course, eventually, under his airs, the Mongol Empire will stretch from the Pacific seaboard all the way across to the Euphrates River in the Middle East, or indeed to the borders of Poland and Hungary further north.
14:38 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. You mentioned there the Qurayshmian Turks are the sort of almost a buffer in a space in between the Mongols as they advance and the Crusader states in the Near East. What impact does the Qurayshmian Turks being displaced by the Mongols have? Do they sort of assault the Near East? Do the people of the Near East realise that this might be a forerunner for something else? Or do they just have to deal with the Turks that are in front of them at that point?
15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, so at this point, the Crusader states are relatively weak compared to the neighbouring powers. They're clinging on to a very narrow strip of coastal territory. They're trying to survive more through diplomacy for the most part, interspersed with moments of aggression at times of major crusades. But the major, the really big power on their borders is the Ayubid Empire. And the Ayubid Empire is basically the empire ruled by Saladin's heirs. And they spend much of their time fighting amongst themselves. But there is a common threat to all the empires of the Middle East, which is that the Mongols are
15:46 Speaker 01 advancing. And you're right. One of the earliest signs of this advance, a kind of bow wave almost in military terms, is the tens of thousands of people displaced by the Mongol advance, moving west, trying to get out of the way. Of course they are, as you said, if you heard the Mongols were coming, you'd be straight out of the door. I think we all would. And so they're moving west, trying to get out of the way. And many of them are just moving as family groups or as small communities. But the Qurayshmians, in the 1230s, they move as a very, very large contingent, including around 10,000 warriors. So they're exceptionally powerful. And 10,000 is probably a bit conservative. They go to the Seljuks
16:30 Speaker 01 in Anatolia, it's modern day Turkey initially, but they're forced to flee from there. And they go south into what would be, in modern day terms, northern Syria. And they're desperate, they're looking for a new homeland. And the Ayubids, so Saladin's dynasty in Egypt, offers them a new homeland.
16:51 Speaker 01 But they're not offering it for free. In exchange, they want military assistance. And they want military assistance against a rival branch of the Ayubid dynasty in Damascus. And as a result, the Qarasmians move south to join forces with the Egyptian Ayubids. And en route, they besiege and sack Jerusalem. This is 1244, and Jerusalem at this point is under Frankish or is within the Crusader states. And after that, the Qarasmians move south and join forces with the Ayubids on the borders of Egypt, or I think it's just around the region of Gaza at this point.
17:33 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, the rival Ayubid faction in Damascus recognizes the threat being posed by the Qarasmians, who have substantially enhanced the rival Egyptian Ayubid faction. And so they make an alliance with the Crusader states, specifically the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And this goes back to what I was saying about the complexity of the landscape, because what we're looking at here is a Qarasmian plus Ayubid alliance, fighting another Ayubid faction allied with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the result of this is a very large battle, a place called Forbi.
18:14 Speaker 01 And the result is a catastrophic defeat for the Damascene Ayubids with their Frankish allies. And so for the Qarasmians and for the Egyptians, this is an enormous victory. After this, the Qarasmians are essentially given the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the southernmost and, well, least small Crusader state that's around. And they just settle the landscape. They don't bother conquering the towns or cities. They just move into the countryside around them. And that creates a crisis. And so messengers go back to Western Europe. Meanwhile, the Ayubid Egyptians attack Damascus, which they managed to conquer for themselves. So this is a period, the Mongols haven't appeared yet. They're still some way off.
18:59 Speaker 01 But nonetheless, the events they've played a part in setting in motion are reshaping the region, and that's eliciting very loud cries for help from the Crusader states, going back to Western Christendom.
19:13 Matt Lewis? So we're already in a state of a bit of chaos and havoc being wreaked by the Mongols before they've even arrived. So it's not even them doing it at this point, but they're causing what's going on. And as you mentioned, the result of all of this in the Near East is that in 1245 Pope Innocent VII calls what we would now know as the Seventh Crusade. And the French King Louis IX takes control, takes the lead in this. Can you tell us a little bit about who Louis IX was and how he ends up being the leader of the Seventh Crusade? Why did he want to do this?
19:47 Speaker 01 So Louis personally is an exceptionally pious ruler, even by the standards of the day. And he's also reasonably competent, but he has been born and raised on the stories of his ancestors, almost all of whom have been on crusade. Louis VIII went on crusade against the heretics in southern France. Philippe II went on the Third Crusade. Louis VII went on the Second Crusade. So he has this tradition, plus the fact that he is himself an exceptionally pious ruler. And of course, Jerusalem has just been taken by the Qarasmin's.
20:33 Speaker 01 So there's a network of different factors. One possible explanation people have also given is that he became ill and he swore when he was ill that if he got better, then he would go on crusade. It's possible another factor in the mix. But it also helps that in this period, France is getting a great deal more powerful. The wars with the Angevin Empire centered in the Kingdom of England, which ruled much of western France in the 12th century, most of those lands now have been reconquered by the kings of France. The kings of France have also extended their authority down, coming much closer to the south coast. And in fact, Louis actually builds a port for his crusade at Aigmont in
21:17 Speaker 01 southern France. So France is a great deal more powerful. It's going to get a great deal more coherent from a bureaucratic perspective going forwards a little bit after this time. So France is going from strength to strength. So Louis's capacity to wage a crusade is also increasing.
21:36 Speaker 01 Having said that, Louis takes leadership of the crusade in part because he's a major crownhead, but also because other people in Western Europe at this time are busy with other things. So, for example, Emperor Frederick II is busy fighting wars both in Germany and in northern Italy. The Kingdom of England is a bit of a mess at this time with various conflicts taking place. So really, it's France that's going to be able to do this because it's the only one that's not entangled by other serious concerns or are able to disentangle themselves from serious concerns. You do get other crusaders from other areas. You do get other monarchs who offer a degree of assistance in one form or another, but it's Louis who goes.
22:21 Matt Lewis? There's lots of opportunity there in the sense that, as you mentioned, incredibly pious people will want to go on crusade and will view it as a kind of a duty. But there was also, we've seen, there can be rivalry between crowned heads who head off on crusade. So friction between kings of France and Holy Roman Emperors and kings of France and kings of England. There's not always room for more than one crowned head. So Louis is able to kind of be the main man here. Is it true that we see the Pope toying with the idea of trying to get the Mongols to become allies against the Ayyubids?
22:56 Speaker 01 The Pope wants to know more. And so in 1245, the Pope sends out a series of envoys, some going via the Middle East, some through Eastern Europe to the Mongols. Yes, the Papacy is absolutely interested in what can be achieved with the Mongols, but at this point, simply knowing who they are, what they want, what they're trying to achieve, how strong are they, why are they able to conquer so much, these basic questions haven't yet been answered. So they're fact finding missions, as it were, but also trying to work out, is there something that can be achieved with the Mongols? Or even, could they be converted? Which would be another, a big question for churchmen at this time. So all those questions are in play.
23:39 Speaker 01 Louis is potentially interested, but he himself received a demand from the Mongols to submit to Mongol authority before this. And only a few years before Louis sets out, the Mongols invade Poland and Hungary and cause enormous devastation to both countries. So Louis is not under any illusions about the threat the Mongols posed to Western Europe. But Louis sets out on crusade with his fleet and he arrives on Cyprus. And there are the beginnings of diplomacy with the Mongols. The Mongols send some Eastern Christians as their envoys to Louis on Cyprus. It's quite an interesting dimension of Mongol diplomacy, actually.
24:21 Speaker 01 If they're approaching a Christian power, they'll often send Christians as their envoys and they will embroider their demands or their opening offer with passages from the Bible. In a similar vein, when they approach a Muslim power, they'll often try and embroider their diplomacy and their diplomatic letters and things like that with passages from the Quran. So it's quite interesting to see how they carry that out. But within the Mongols' correspondence to Louis, it's quite striking, really. In some ways, you could read them as standard demands. The Mongols should rule the world. This is what they feel that they have been granted and therefore everyone should submit to them.
25:03 Speaker 01 And yet somehow within it, there is also a very strong hint, they might be open to an alliance at the same time. And so Louis sends out emissaries to the Mongols to try and continue those negotiations, but they never really come to anything, not from Louis' perspective.
25:19 Matt Lewis? And I guess if we've got Louis on Cyprus now, that's quite a good place for us to have him sat while we think about what his aims might be, because from there, you know, he could try and reinforce the crusade estates along the coast in the Levant. He could aim to reconquer Jerusalem or he could follow in the footsteps of the Fifth Crusade and target Egypt instead. What do we know about what he decides to do and where he goes next?
25:45 Speaker 01 The whole question of how to conquer Jerusalem is exceptionally complicated. And it's a question lots of people at the time are writing about and thinking about. Because it's not as simple as land your army at the nearest point to Jerusalem, march to Jerusalem, besiege it, conquer Jerusalem, go home. No one, or none of the key strategic thinkers are suggesting that as a line of approach. And there's a very good reason for that, which is that a standard crusade, like Louis' crusade, in fact Louis lingers longer than most, but most crusaders won't be prepared to be away from home for more than, say, three, four years.
26:28 Speaker 01 So if Louis took Jerusalem, fine, he might be able to take it. And then he'll go, and then it will disappear again because it will be conquered immediately afterwards. Because the kingdom of Jerusalem, what's left of it, simply isn't strong enough to defend Jerusalem in the long term, and Louis knows this. In many ways, when Frederick II achieved control over Jerusalem via diplomacy, this is a case in point. As soon as the 10-year truce with the Iobhids expired, Jerusalem became imperiled and was ultimately lost entirely in 1244,
27:07 Speaker 01 a mere, what, 15 years after Frederick arranged for it to be included into the Crusader states. So there is a short-termism that they're trying to avoid. Yes, they can probably get Jerusalem, but how do they keep it in the long term? And you've got various leaders grappling with that question, going all the way back to the Third Crusade. Richard I had very similar conversations with experts, the de tempers and hospitlers, who are experts in the whole business of campaigning in the Middle East. So there's got to be a different way of doing it. And the solution a lot of people land on is Egypt.
27:50 Speaker 01 Now, that might sound like a very strange thing to say. Egypt is a long way away from Jerusalem. How could that possibly be seen as a means to conquer Jerusalem? Well, the answer to that is if you just sort of summon up a map of the Middle East. Egypt is the economic centre. It's way more valuable economically than any other area. Branches of the Silk Roads from Central Asia and China pass through Egypt. Much of the spice route trade from Southeast Asia, India, crossing the Indian Ocean, then north across the Red Sea to Eastern Egypt.
28:31 Speaker 01 All that traffic, or a large chunk of it, will then go to Egypt, where the goods will be transported to the major cities, or taken by canal to Alexandria and Damietta on the north coast for transshipment into the Mediterranean trade. So Egypt is economically crucial. So the thinking goes like this. Many crusading strategists suggest conquering Egypt first. The idea being if Egypt can be conquered with all that revenue under their control, and having denied that revenue to their opponents, they can then afford to finance an army big enough in the Middle East
29:13 Speaker 01 for the permanent re-establishment of control over Jerusalem. And so this is the thinking. Conquer Egypt and then establish a position in Egypt and use those resources for permanent control over Jerusalem. And so that's what Louis is after, and that's why Louis is after that.
29:32 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. And I guess there's an extent to which politically as well, if the Ayyubids in Egypt are largely controlling Muslim-held Near Eastern, if you disrupt that, then that's a way to disrupt that whole area before you go there, as well as then having all of their wealth and economic power as well. And this sounds a lot like what we saw with the Fifth Crusade. The idea is to target Egypt and from there to move towards Jerusalem. And we saw the Fifth Crusade have a bit of initial success that looked really, really promising, and then the wheels fell off. What happened for the Seventh Crusade?
30:07 Speaker 01 Well, from Louis' perspective, it starts looking really promising and then the wheels fall off. Oh. Okay, so, yeah, there are marked similarities to the Fifth Crusade. So what Louis does is he marshals his forces on Cyprus. And then with his fleet, he attacks the north coast of Egypt, again, following the course of the Fifth Crusade, by besieging Damietta, which is on the north eastern side of the Nile Delta. Now, it took the Fifth Crusade, I forget exactly how long it was, but it was about a year to get into Damietta. But in Louis' case, this is very different.
30:51 Speaker 01 So Louis' fleet gathers off the coast, and then from amongst that fleet comes a line of longboats, bringing the first assault parties of Louis' crusade. Now, the Ayubid army is waiting for them on the beach, lines of archers, lines of troops, ready to receive the attack. And so you should imagine a sort of crossfire, as crossbowmen from the approaching boats and archers from the beach begin to exchange barrages of arrows and crossbow bolts, trying to gain the upper hand. And then the crusaders jump down from their boats and charge in towards the beach. And in the shallows, they're met with the Ayubid infantry, and there's a big clash
31:36 Speaker 01 in the shallow water. And it's a significant battle, but it does ultimately turn in Louis' favour. And so he gains the beach. Now, that wasn't, again, this is very much, very similar to the Fifth Crusade, the Fifth Crusade didn't have too much trouble getting onto the beach. The next question is Damietta. And Damietta is massively fortified. And the current Sultan of Egypt has specifically a refortified and resourced and built up his armaments in Damietta, so it can resist a very long siege.
32:15 Speaker 01 But here's the catch, the garrison in Damietta, a Bedouin garrison, evacuates the city immediately after Louis takes the beach.
32:28 Speaker 01 And so Louis' forces just walk in. So this major frontier bulwark of the Ayubids' defences simply collapses. So for the Ayubid forces, this is terrifying and extremely concerning. They were counting on Damietta to hold the Crusade for a long time or to hold them entirely. Because of course, they know by now, the Ayubids are fully aware that if we can hold the Crusaders off for a few years, they're not going to be around forever. They're not a permanent feature on the landscape. If we can just hold them off, then they'll go away. So for the Ayubids, as for so many previous commanders, playing for time is crucial.
33:13 Speaker 01 You've got to hold the Crusaders off and they will go home. But now Damietta has fallen within a couple of days. And within that, the Crusaders have acquired a fully supplied base, all those munitions and a huge pile of food. So things begin to look very worrying from an Ayubid perspective. Now meanwhile, the Crusaders advance up the Nile south. And of course, they're heading ultimately towards Cairo. But Damietta is a little bit, it's a bit, a little bit like it's on an island in that there's a main branch of the, of the Nile that goes down to, has, which leads Damietta to its east.
33:54 Speaker 01 And there is another, another smaller branch of the Nile, which forks a little bit further upstream and then passes down Damietta to the west. So to get, to continue their journey towards Cairo, they have to cross that branch of the Nile. And so they reach the point where the Nile forks and they're looking for a way across. And I have to say, if a film producer wanted to create this, it would be an epic scene because you have the Crusaders on one bank of the Nile being supplied by ships coming from Damietta. And they're trying to build an earthen causeway across this, the smaller branch of the Nile. On the other side of the branch.
34:39 Speaker 01 The Ayubid army has set up a line of counterweight trebuchets, hurling lumps of rock at this causeway, trying to prevent it being built. And meanwhile, you have boats and crossbowmen and archers, all trying to hamper the other side. It's an incredible sort of cross-river conflict. But it's not going anywhere for the Crusaders. The Ayubids are doing quite a good job of holding the Crusaders at arm's length. And their main army is just a very short way further north, outside a town called Mansoura. So, for the Ayubids, the goal is to keep the Crusaders there. They can't cross the river.
35:20 Speaker 01 For the Crusaders, the goal is to find a way across. But the Ayubids have another problem, because Bedouin goes to Louis and says that he knows a place a little bit further down this branch of the Nile, where it can be forded. And so Louis's forces set out. And they find that it can indeed be forded. And so the vanguard under Louis's brother crosses the Nile. And Louis's instructions are that once Robert of Artois with the vanguard has crossed the Nile, he has to wait.
36:00 Speaker 01 And then the main army will come across and join him. But Robert of Artois has other ideas, not quite clear if it's Robert or the Templars who are with him, who are pushing for this. But Robert sets off without waiting for the main army and leads his vanguard of around 700 heavy cavalry in a massive cavalry charge directly into the Ayubid camp. This takes the Ayubids utterly by surprise. Robert of Artois's forces overrun the entire Ayubid army. And so the Ayubid army, realising the day is lost, begin to pour in huge numbers through
36:42 Speaker 01 the gates of the nearby town of Mansoura, looking for the safety of that town and its walls. So having routed the entire Ayubid army and at the point of victory for the Crusaders and defeat for the Ayubids, Robert of Artois reforms his cavalry. And we're not sure who gave the advice or whether it was him himself, but he decides that what he's going to do is charge directly into Mansoura with his heavy cavalry. And he does that, but heavy cavalry works well in open spaces, but in narrow roads
37:23 Speaker 01 and alleyways in a packed town filled with wagons and Ayubid soldiers who have escaped the fighting, it doesn't perform so well. And only three of Robert of Artois's forces ever got out of that town alive. Robert of Artois, according to one story, did fight his way out of the town, but was killed in the process of doing so. But while all of this is taking place and all this big confrontation near Mansoura is playing out, and again, those listeners who are familiar with the Fifth Crusade will recognise another parallel here, is that there's another dimension to the conflict which is beginning to emerge, which is that the Ayubids have got ships onto the main branch of the Nile.
38:07 Speaker 01 And they're using those ships to cut the supply lines, bringing ships down to the Crusader camp near Mansoura. And so the Crusaders begin to starve. They're not getting enough food and eventually they're getting nowhere against the Ayubid army, they're running out of food and the decision is made to withdraw. So Louis's army begins to pull back, it withdraws as far as it can. By this point, sickness is spreading rapidly in the crusading army and eventually they become surrounded and are forced to surrender.
38:41 Speaker 01 And Louis himself is taken prisoner. So this is a massive defeat for the Seventh Crusade. But as we shall see, this is also not necessarily good news for the Ayubids.
38:54 Matt Lewis? I guess we ought to bring in as well, the Ayubids themselves are in a bit of a mess in Egypt. They're facing their own problems. We've got the emergence of the Mamluks and I guess we ought to talk a bit about who the Mamluks are and how they come to be real power players during this period as well.
39:09 Speaker 01 Now, the Ayubids, just like so many dynasties across the Middle East, they are accustomed to deploying Mamluk forces. Now, Mamluk forces are basically people who have been purchased by a ruler or a ruling elite as enslaved people and then converted to Islam and trained as elite warriors. Now, lots of dynasties do this across the Middle East. It's standard practice, but the Ayubids have particularly done it. And one of the reasons for this is as the Mongols advanced across what today would be Russia and Eastern Europe,
39:47 Speaker 01 far to the north, they seized tens of thousands of people who they then sold into the Mediterranean trade as enslaved people via ports in the Crimea. Now, all of that meant that enslaved people could be purchased at a very low price. And so the Ayubids buy them in large numbers. And so the Mamluk regiments get bigger and bigger. But there's a problem, which I'm guessing that many people will be picking up on now, which is that there's only a limit how large you can make these forces before they start to realise that they've got serious leverage on their own account. But the Sultan's got another problem, which is that he's seriously ill.
40:30 Speaker 01 And he's, I think by this point, he's, it's becoming clear that this is an illness from which he's not going to recover. And that raises a crisis of leadership because his son and heir, Turan Shah, who's in northern Syria.
40:50 Speaker 01 He and his father don't get on. And so it's not as simple as the Sultan just calling for his son and heir to come and take over. He doesn't call for him. And the Sultan dies. So suddenly, Ayubid Egypt is leaderless. So what happens next? And this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the history of this particular crusade, which is that it's his wife, Shaja al-Durr, who steps in and says, oh yeah, my husband's alive. He's just in his bed, he's a bit ill, but he's issued these orders. And so she begins to hand out orders. She's working with some of the senior army commanders who are, who know what's going on, but they keep the Sultan's death a secret. And she begins to issue orders in his name.
41:35 Speaker 01 And what she's trying to do is to hold things together. Because she knows that as soon as news gets out that the Sultan is dead, that there'll be chaos unless there is an heir in place. And so she sends out envoys pretty quickly to get Turan Shah south into Egypt to come and take charge of the situation.
41:55 Matt Lewis? Yeah, because it's around about now that a figure emerges, Baybars, who will be a really key figure in the Mamluk faction. So who is Baybars? What do we know about him? How does he become quite so important?
42:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. Baybars began his career as, rather as I said, really, as an enslaved person, taken captive on the, it's thought, near the shores of the Black Sea, sold into slavery. He was sort of passed from one ruler to another for a while and ended up in service to the Ayubids, like so many people. So Sultan Baybars will rise to become a major power, but at this point, the former Ayubid Sultan's heir, Turan Shah, arrives, takes power for himself. And it seems as though things will continue much as they ever had.
42:53 Speaker 01 The Ayubids are victorious. The Crusaders are defeated and surrendered. Louis is a prisoner of the Ayubids. Everything's going the Ayubids' way. But the new Sultan alienates the Mamluks. And the Mamluks feel as if they haven't received their due from the victory. And so now, legend reports it was Byblos, but the Mamluks ultimately seize Turan Shah and then murder him on the banks of the Nile. Now, immediately after that, there is the question of who's going to rule next. And essentially, this is the process by which the Mamluks rise to power.
43:36 Speaker 01 And through a series of different rulers, they assert themselves as rulers of Egypt. In the early days, they normally set up an Ayubid puppet, so someone they can claim is the Ayubid Sultan. But in fact, they're running Egypt themselves. But after a few years, they're simply just assert themselves as Egypt's rulers, independent. So the Seventh Crusade is a catastrophe for the Crusaders. It is also a catastrophe for the Ayubids. It is also the rise of a new empire that will survive until the early 16th century, when it's conquered by the Ottomans, which is the rise of the Mamluk Empire.
44:17 Matt Lewis? And one of the most crucial things we see during this early Mamluk period is kind of in around 1260, we see them come into conflict with the Mongols. And this seems to be a fairly seismic clash that could well have determined the direction, the rulership of this whole region for years to come. Because suddenly, the unstoppable Mongols find someone who stops them.
44:40 Speaker 01 Yes, so of course, all these events with Louis' crusade are not taking place in a vacuum. Events are changing in the wider world. Not least the fact that Louis sent emissaries himself to go and negotiate with the Mongols. Doesn't really come to anything. The Mongols are moving forwards and huge numbers of displaced people are moving in front of them. So.
45:07 Speaker 01 There is a new great Khan called Munka. And Munka sends his brother Huligoo to the Middle East with the goal of, I suspect that the real goal was to conquer everything that's left, anything that's still independent. And there's not much. The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, which is basically Baghdad and a few surrounding towns, is still independent. The crusade estates are independent and the Mamluks are independent. So, Huligoo sets off and in 1256,
45:44 Speaker 01 he enters the Middle East and soon after this, he advances on Baghdad. Now Baghdad is one of the largest cities in the world at this time. And the Mongols surround the city, they lay siege. And then ultimately they conquer the city with enormous loss of life, an enormous massacre of the population, which of course, for the inhabitants and specifically for Sunni Islam and for the Abbasid Caliphate, this is an enormous tragedy, this is a major disaster. Not to mention that the casualties will have been in something in the region of six figures. So we're talking about a very, very significant and bloody event. After this, the Mongols then head north into Syria.
46:27 Speaker 01 And they conquer the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, which is an Ayubid city. And then immediately after that, the Ayubids in Damascus evacuate Damascus because they can see this isn't going to work. And ultimately a Mongol flying column picks up the Ayubid Sultan in Damascus. Of course, the Ayubids in Syria, they're still, they survive the 7th Crusade. It's only Egypt that's conquered by the Mamluks. But the Mongols conquer what's left of them in 1260. So, the only independent powers now are the crusade estates and the Mamluks in Egypt. And the crusade estates are very much veering towards allying with them or submitting to the Mongols.
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48:19 Matt Lewis? The Principality of the Crusader States are in such a poor situation now that they must have been looking at the Mongols and thinking, we can't resist these guys if they come, but maybe we could just point them at the Mamluks instead?
48:31 Speaker 01 Absolutely. The Mongols are unstoppable. Hudegu's army has been estimated, the lower end estimates put it at about 100,000 troops. On a good day, the Crusader States, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, can manage about 10,000. So there is going to be no stopping the Mongols with the Crusader States and the Principality of Antioch submits early to the Mongols. Kingdom of Jerusalem opens negotiations with the Mongols, doesn't quite submit, but it's to sort of sound out what can be achieved there. And then the Mamluks do something rather unexpected. And that is that more or less anyone, anywhere in Eurasia, under threat of invasion by the
49:15 Speaker 01 Mongols, if they've decided to fight and not to submit, what they will do generally is to prepare their defences and wait to be attacked. But the Mamluks don't do that. They march out beyond Egypt and assertively seek combat with the Mongols, which is an incredibly gutsy thing to do. And they know by this stage that there's no alternative for them because they made it very clear what they're going to do because a short while before this, the Mongols sent envoys to the Mamluks and a Mamluk killed all but one of the envoys and shaved the beard from the third. There is no other way this is going to resolve now, except on the battlefield.
49:57 Speaker 01 So the Mamluks march out with an army of around 12,000 against a Mongol force of 100,000, seeking battle. And we have reports of Mamluk commanders saying, why are we doing this? This isn't going to work. But no, the Mamluk Sultan, who at this point is called Chituz, he's determined he's going to do this. And the Mamluks reach out to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and say, do you want to fight with us? Just again, another example that the battle lines are rather more complicated in the Middle East and are often presented. And the Kingdom of Jerusalem hedges its bets. It doesn't want to fight the Mongols, so it doesn't want to fight with the Mamluks. But it provides food and sells horses to the Mamluks, I presume,
50:42 Speaker 01 so that in the unlikely event of a Mamluk victory, it can present itself as having been supportive. At the same time, in the case of a Mongol victory, it could say, well, we didn't help them. So there's a degree of diplomacy going on there. But events work out very well for the Mamluks because the Great Khan, Huligun's brother Monka, dies. And so Huligun unexpectedly withdraws with the greater part of his army eastwards because he wants to be involved in the political fallout from the Great Khan's death. And he only leaves a garrison in Syria to hold the territory. They've never been attacked. No one attacks the Mongols. The Mongols are attacking everyone. They are not attacked
51:24 Speaker 01 themselves. Except they are, because the Mamluks are on the advance. And the Mamluks meet this garrison at a battle called Ayn Jalut, which is a surprise victory for the Mamluks. And immediately after that, the Mamluks take Damascus and Aleppo, who are more than happy to hand themselves over to the Mamluks because they've been under Mongol rule and so the Mamluks look like saviors to them. Suddenly, the Mongols have been defeated, but it's just a garrison. The main field army hasn't been defeated. And of course, as soon as Huligun learns what's happened, he swears he's going to have his revenge as soon as he possibly can.
52:06 Matt Lewis? I often wonder what would happen if the Mongols didn't have this situation where they withdraw everything and go back to the centre when there's a succession going on, because it kind of brings to a whole everything that they've managed to achieve up until then. And it feels like a slightly bizarre situation, but obviously the Mamluks here have absolutely exploited the fortune that they found in front of them. And they've managed to beat the Mongols, which even if it's just a garrison, people don't do. Presumably, this is a big propaganda victory for the Mamluks too. Are they then able to assert themselves more widely in the region? What does this mean for the crusader states now?
52:45 Speaker 01 So the main thing that helps the Mamluks is that in the years after Ayingalut, although the Mongols have sworn revenge immediately, the Mongol Empire is in the process of breaking up into different sections ruled by different branches of the imperial family. And in the Middle East, Hulagu's territories that become known as the Ilkhanate, they are also claimed by a rival branch of the family, which is becomes known as the Khanate of the Golden Horde, further north in sort of Russia, Eastern Europe, that sort of region. And they go to war. And it's a disastrous war fought across the Caucasus Mountains, which involves massive casualties for both sides. And that gives the Mamluks about 20
53:28 Speaker 01 years with which to rebuild, to build themselves up, expand their trade, expand their army and fortify the Euphrates River. They even send out teams of burners to burn grassland to prevent the Mongol armies from grazing their horses there. But that 20-year period gives the Mamluks time to ready their defences. So when the Mongols do ultimately re-invade in 1281, no one's ready for a Mongol invasion, but they're as ready as they can be. And that means that there's another big battle fought. And one historian says that the Mongol battle line was 26 kilometres wide. This is vast-scale war-making. But the Mamluks defeat them again. And in many ways, this is a more significant battle than Ayingalut, because
54:13 Speaker 01 they're meeting the Mongols at full strength. And despite the disparity in numbers, the Mamluks defeat them, the Mongols are put to flight again. And the Mongols won't return in force to that theatre of war for another 18 years. And it's a crucial point that in those gaps, so between Imjolut and Homs, 21 years, Homs and the Mongols return in 1299, 18 years, the Mamluks spend those intervening years taking apart the crusader states. And this doesn't take place in some kind of epic showdown or massive battle. There's hardly any battles at all, because the crusader states
54:53 Speaker 01 realise that they are vastly outnumbered by the Mamluks. And so town by town, city by city, stronghold by stronghold, the Mamluks take the crusader states apart in a series of campaigns that ultimately sees the collapse of the mainland crusader states in 1291.
55:11 Matt Lewis? And it's interesting, isn't it, that after almost 200 years of the crusader states being there and of Christians having a presence in the Near East and these fluctuating periods of conflict in crusades, that it's not some seismic battle that ends it all, it's a slow dismantling of what the Christians had and then being forced out. And we don't see, again, we don't see at this point, a big crusading zeal in Europe, do we? Have the European Christians simply lost their interest? Do they not believe it's winnable anymore? Do they not see the urgency that was there 200 years earlier to go and reclaim Jerusalem?
55:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so there's a number of factors. There are a lot of calls for a major crusade, particularly in the 1270s, under the pontificate of Gregory the 10th. But it doesn't really happen. Gregory the 10th dies at a crucial moment, which causes those plans to collapse. But
56:12 Speaker 01 There's also a lot of other wars going on in Western Europe. People are preoccupied with other major conflicts. There's a conflict over Sicily. England's fighting various civil wars. There's wars elsewhere. It's just, it's just not a propitious environment in which to create a new crusade. And indeed, there'll be no big crusade really to the Middle East. Despite major calls for crusades, the next really big army to set off for the Middle East is over 100 years later in 1396. So, no, it never really happens. And it's that ongoing infighting and the internal sort of disputes of Western Christendom's leaders that play a major part in that.
56:55 Matt Lewis? Yeah. I just find it so fascinating that it all begins in this big explosion of the first crusade. And in the end, 200 years later, it's effectively really just a petering out. It kind of just, I don't know, crumbles, is picked apart by the the Mamluks, but crumbles and goes away. And there simply isn't any more crusader states and no more Christian crusading in the Holy Land, really. It's a weird kind of, from all of that early activity and what the Christians must have believed was a promise that they were going to hold the Holy Land for Christianity. They've just sort of given up 200 years later and they realise they either can't do it or there just isn't the will to do it at all.
57:35 Speaker 01 The world's very much changing. There's no shortage of armchair strategists. In fact, there's a real sort of, there's a whole genre of texts that are created after 1291, where people were like, if we raised an army here and we marched it there and they did this, then it could be, the crusader states could be reconstructed. There's lots of that kind of thinking, but no, there's no major crusade. And of course, in the 14th century, there are other things that will make it even more difficult, things like the Great Famine early on, later on, the Black Death, among other things, not to mention the ongoing persistent churn of conflicts. The Hundred Years' War kicks off between England and France and it becomes...
58:16 Speaker 01 Adverse weather for crusading in that area. There's quite a lot of enthusiasm for it, but it never really takes off after that. No major crusade reaches the actual Holy Land region again.
58:27 Matt Lewis? So, thank you very much, Nick. And if people want to find out more, where can they find some of your work?
58:32 Speaker 01 Okay, yes. So I've written a book about this whole era of history called The Mongol Storm, which is basically a history of the Middle East in the 13th century, told from about 10 different cultural perspectives. If you're interested, I've also just finished another book, which is coming out in June, called The Crusader Storm, which does a similar job for the 12th century. So it's a history of the Crusades in the Middle East in the 12th century, again, told from around 10 different cultural perspectives, trying to give a rounded view to events and trying to show how the Crusades fitted in and amongst everything else that's going on in this era.
59:11 Matt Lewis? Brilliant. That's something to look forward to. Mongol Storm was absolutely incredible. So I'm very much looking forward to the Crusader Storm to accompany it. Now, listeners, don't go away. This episode isn't quite finished. We've charted the steady decline of the Crusader states in the face of terrifying Mongol incursions and a rampant Mamluk empire. But crusading didn't stop there in 1291 with the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Its effects were felt all across the medieval world and beyond for centuries to come, whilst its legacies remain contested to this very day. So to end this epic series, explore what we've learned and unpack what the Crusades left behind, I'm delighted to be joined by Eleanor. Hi Eleanor.
59:55 Eleanor Janega? Hello, Matt. Thanks for having me.
59:57 Matt Lewis? You are always welcome. So I guess if we're going to think about the legacies of crusade.
1:00:02 Eleanor Janega? So like, I think what we can say there is that all winds right down in about 1291. I think, would that be fair, do you think?
1:00:11 Matt Lewis? I think, I mean, we've got kind of the eight numbered Crusades. We need to throw in all the other bits and pieces that are going on in the mix with all of that. But kind of by 1291, there isn't an army that physically goes. But that's different to the desire of particularly the papacy. We see them continue to preach crusades.
1:00:32 Matt Lewis? For centuries after 1291, you know, for, for the whole of the 14th century, they would love a crusade to head to the Holy Land again. But it just becomes more and more difficult to make that happen for a number of reasons. I, you can't help wondering, in amongst the many, many reasons, is the fact that it patently doesn't work.
1:00:51 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, it's like, there's a real like fool me twice, shame on you, sort of a thing happening.
1:00:56 Matt Lewis? Fool me eight times.
1:00:57 Eleanor Janega? Fool me eight times. Wow, I really should have learned something by now. And, and this is the thing is, people do, right? People do. And eventually you are going to figure out that it doesn't seem like God is as committed to this as, as I am, you know, in my heart. And also, you know, really what's in it for the kings in question? Because we've already seen how difficult it is to hold any land over there. So it's just going to be a time suck, a money suck, especially by the time you get to the 14th century, like babes, I can't even feed my own people. How am I ever going to get over to the Holy Land? Then you have the Black Death. And how are you ever going to come up with enough people to move over there? It's like, we are barely keeping the farms going right now.
1:01:41 Eleanor Janega? So there are going to be a lot of social pressures on this concept as well. But you know, as you say, yeah, it turns out these guys are kind of smart.
1:01:48 Matt Lewis? We thought when we talked about the causes of the crusades, a bit about the climatic factors that are going on, the medieval war period. We get to the end of the 13th century, that's also ending and we're moving towards the Little Ice Age. So we've got the 14th century of catastrophes, you talked about the Great Famine, the Black Death. But also there isn't that sense of comfort and abundance in Europe that there once was, which helped to feed the crusade. So for the crusading movement, some of its, some of its fodder has gone. The things that it's been living off for a couple of centuries are starting to vanish.
1:02:18 Eleanor Janega? And I think one of the big things that's starting to vanish as well at this point in time are these specific crusading orders. I think this is an important point to get at because trouble with, you know, attempting to maintain the Holy Land is, wow, these guys got real rich, huh? And that is something that kings take note of and they exploit, right? Like, this is one of the big things. Like, it's one thing if you are Richard I and you can say, well, how do you maintain things like that when there's like the Templars going, hello, we're the Templars? And everyone can say, oh, I'm just giving money to the Templars right now. Like, why would I, why would I give it to the king? Right?
1:02:57 Eleanor Janega? But then also that introduces, I think, kings eyeing people like the Templars up. When you have these incredibly wealthy groups of individuals who, again, aren't even really able to do their jobs, right?
1:03:14 Matt Lewis? They've been spectacularly successful. They've created what we would probably call today a multinational company. You know, they're almost like a medieval Amazon. They are everywhere and they will deliver to your door if you give them money for it. They are creating banking systems across Western Europe. They are controlling money and the movement of funds. They are in the ear of monarchs and nobles across Europe in a way that the Templar Order was never designed to be. And as you say, people are looking at them. And I think people like Philip IV in France, he wants their money.
1:03:47 Eleanor Janega? And then this is the thing, right? They've been pushed out of the Holy Land. Here they are, like, in Cyprus. Here they are, kind of like, falling back into triptych further and further again. And is it true that they aren't really doing the thing that they want? Yes. But it's also true that if you are Philip and you start eyeing them up and you take everything away from them, then you're not going to be able to count on their largesse, on their supply lines later on if you decide to go over to the Holy Land.
1:04:20 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I think their kind of failure and their fall is in pretty stark contrast to the way that the hospital has managed to come out of the crusading era, because they don't necessarily go down that route of becoming this banking group. They're not this multinational corporation that are in European countries, getting involved in politics and stuff there. They've managed to position themselves much more as almost a frontier of- Of Christendom, and that seems to serve them that they're saying, we will hold this line.
1:04:48 Eleanor Janega? Hmm. And I think that that is really canny, right? Because if what we're saying is, yeah, sorry, lads, looks like the Holy Land's a bit of a nonstarter, what you can do is at least say, well, we are the line, right? We are the wall that is holding back the theoretical hordes of Gog and Magog, right?
1:05:06 Matt Lewis? Where the Templars are falling back to Cyprus, the Hospitallers are falling back to Rhodes until they get pushed out of there by the Ottomans in the 16th century. And then they'll fall back to Malta and, you know, they'll be on Malta till Napoleon gets rid of them at the, the end of the 18th century, which is
1:05:21 Eleanor Janega? God bless them all. It's a good run. It's a good run.
1:05:24 Matt Lewis? It's a good run. And it's a weird flex from Napoleon. Why are you feeling the need to demolish the Hospitallers?
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1:06:19 Speaker 02 If you love a good story, why aren't you listening to Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast? It's a show where we tell you every amazing, crazy and important thing that's ever happened in human history. From the perilous voyages of the first Polynesians, the discoveries of Captain Cook, the deadly Viking raids on Britain and Ireland, the rise and fall of the great English kings and queens. We'll tell you how Waterloo was won, the Alamo was lost and all the history in between. So make sure you check it out. Dan Snow's History Hit for the best true stories ever told, wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07:11 Matt Lewis? But they seem to manage to do what the Templars couldn't do. Whether the Templars have got overconfident, forgotten what they're about, I don't know. But like I say, I think the Hospitallers do this really interesting thing of saying, we will maintain this front line and just leave us alone.
1:07:26 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, but I mean, speaking of this front line that they are maintaining, big part of what they're arguing they're maintaining is a line against our good friends, the Ottomans. And it is true that at this point in time, you know, we've had the Seljuk Turks before. This is like too Turk, too furious. We got Ottomans now and they will go on to be like the major power in Asia Minor for quite some time.
1:07:51 Matt Lewis? And it's quite striking how close that mirrors the events leading up to the first crusade in that you've got this sudden Turk threat on the edges of Christendom that forces them to become mobilized. You know, it's not Alexios appealing from Byzantium anymore, but it's that same sort of notion. And at the end of the 14th century, 100 years after we've said, we think crusading has really ended, there is what 15,000 men who march out to try and fight against the Ottomans. They don't do a very good job of it.
1:08:24 Eleanor Janega? They do.
1:08:24 Matt Lewis? It does not go well.
1:08:25 Eleanor Janega? No.
1:08:25 Matt Lewis? And yet, for some reason, that's not, it's not called a crusade. It's not numbered as a crusade. We don't think of it as a continuation of the crusading period. I don't know whether, at this point, are we much more openly acknowledging that this is far more to do with land and territory than it is to do with religion?
1:08:40 Eleanor Janega? I think that is a big part of it, right? Because it's not as though we aren't going to see a bunch of crusades happening at the same time that are largely European, you know, because, listen, go ask the Teutonic Knights what they're doing up in the Baltic right now. And they'll say, oh, that's a crusade.
1:08:58 Matt Lewis? And you can still see, I think, the Roman Church in its arrogance and its conviction of its own superiority and correctness.
1:09:06 Matt Lewis? When Tamalaine emerges to try and rebuild the Mongol Empire, he stops the Ottomans in their tracks and it looks for a little while like the Mongols are back in a Chinggis Khan kind of way.
1:09:17 Eleanor Janega? Oh, yeah.
1:09:18 Matt Lewis? And what does Rome do? They preach a crusade against Tamalaine.
1:09:21 Eleanor Janega? Which, good luck. I mean, like, I swear to God, like, yeah, hearing this, all the stories about, like, the piles of skulls as thrones and they're like, yeah, guys, I think that we really stand a chance. It should be absolutely fine. Yeah.
1:09:33 Matt Lewis? Yeah. But, and you do still see crusading rhetoric, you know, carrying on into the early modern period because the Ottomans are now on the borders of the Habsburgs lands. But again, crusading rhetoric is used. People are willing to pull it out of the drawer when they want money because in Crusade, a big crusading tax. Give us loads of money and we'll go and fight the Ottomans who are about to breach our borders and head into your lands. But it never, ever works still, does it? And again, are we stuck with this idea that this is no longer about, this isn't Rome, this isn't Western Christendoms over in France worried about what's happening thousands of miles away. We're seeing Habsburgs being concerned that their Ottoman neighbors might be about to
1:10:18 Matt Lewis? take their land and everybody is thinking, I know what you're doing.
1:10:22 Eleanor Janega? Well, and of course they do, right? When you're saying, you said it yourself, like, these French people aren't like, oh, what's going on thousands of miles away. French people are like, ha, ha, stick it to the Habsburgs. I mean, France is the first of France. It's one of the first to be like, no, I'm in it with them, right? Which would be unthinkable.
1:10:38 Matt Lewis? So if you went back a few hundred years and you explained that France would side with the Ottoman Turks against the rest of Western Christendom and Eastern Christendom, people would be utterly bemused. Would France have even existed? Would they have allowed France as a country to exist if it had been doing that? It's a bizarre situation that completely undermines the idea that any of this is crusading because you've got the most Christian king. So we've been talking about Western Christian efforts to retake the Near East, the Holy Land, the Eastern Mediterranean. And even if all of that ends in 1291, then crusading elsewhere, the idea of fighting people whose religious beliefs aren't the same as yours in principle, does continue
1:11:23 Matt Lewis? in other places.
1:11:24 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, I mean, I think probably first off the top of our heads, we could talk about what's going on on the Iberian Peninsula, for example. And granted, you know, we've done innumerable episodes about what is going on, you know, with El Cid and situations like this. It's not clear cut. It's not like, oh, it's Christians versus Muslims, it's Muslims versus Christian. Who knows who's controlling Astoria at any given moment? Who is controlling Granada? Who's to say, right? But we do eventually have the situation by the time we get to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, where fundamentally, the last Muslim kingdoms are destroyed. Was there a bunch of back and forth? Yes. And now, we often call this the reconquista.
1:12:08 Eleanor Janega? I don't like to call it the reconquista because Franco came up with that, and I don't like fascists. But fundamentally, this is kind of a situation wherein Christians did eventually say, look, I don't need to go all the way. Like, you know, it's that old joke, you know, we've got Muslims at home, you know, like, we're not going all the way to the Middle East in order to fight them, we can do it right here, you know? And this does culminate in a pretty big success on Ferdinand and Isabella's part. Do I think that they were bad people? Yes. Do I like the Spanish Inquisition? No. But it is like one of those big, that's an early modern success story, baby.
1:12:47 Eleanor Janega? Like, you know, you create a huge kingdom out of what had been 10 medieval kingdoms before, and you say, and now also, because we control it, we can also enforce what the religion is. Imagine telling a medieval person, oh, yeah, yeah, there's only one, one state on the Iberian Peninsula, and also, they control what the religion is. You know, people would be shocked by that in the medieval period, the idea that such a huge amount of land could be under control of one dynasty, and that you could actually get rid of all of the Jewish Muslim people, it it just wouldn't commute.
1:13:23 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and the the Iberian Peninsula is something that, you know, the Aymyads arrive in the south of Iberia in the the eighth century. Pretty successful there for a couple of centuries till they begin to fall apart. And again, it's kind of this fracturing of the internal Muslim world that begins to allow the Christians back in. And so it also overlaps the end of what we've defined as a crusading period in the terms of the Near East by a couple of centuries. And I think it is interesting that we see popes being aware of that and quite often trying to stop everybody going to the Holy Land because there is also a fight to be had over here. So popes are willing to say, if you can't go to the Holy Land, here's, you know, a shortcut alternative.
1:14:04 Matt Lewis? You know, you can you can use Santiago de Compostela as Jerusalem kind of thing. Because I think they're conscious that if you evacuate every night from Western Christendom and off the Iberian Peninsula, there is another frontier there that they're having to deal with. And it's significant. I think that begins a couple of centuries before the crusading era, and it lasts a couple of centuries longer than the crusading era. It's it's a much more long term effort and maybe more of an existential threat because this is on what is considered European territory than the Crusades, which almost makes it odd that popes are willing to look east rather than focusing all of their efforts here first. In crusading terms, it's it's a success story. As if from a Christian point of view,
1:14:47 Matt Lewis? Iberia is a success story in the way that the Near East never ever is. And in some ways, the success there kind of spawns this early modern continuation of crusading ideals when we get to the age of exploration. Because you think of people like Columbus and Cortez going out there, part of what they're obsessed with doing is Christianizing everybody that they meet.
1:15:07 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, absolutely. And that is specifically something that they are charged with doing. So we have to remember that, you know, this kind of push out west, out across the oceans, they push down into Africa, the beginnings of this push for the wholesale chattel slavery of Africans. It is all driven by this idea of Christianizing. They don't say that there are no worlds left to conquer. They just say, oh, well, we did it here. Where are we going to go to next? How far do I need to go in a boat in order to continue doing? A version of holy war, a version of violence against people in order to Christianize them. And the papacy is very clear in the early modern period about all of this.
1:15:49 Eleanor Janega? These are things that are completely acceptable under the doctrines of holy war. And that is something that I think medieval Christians would recognize a little bit more, even if they would be kind of confused by the idea of this being a crusade, I think.
1:16:06 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and you do see Columbus in particular, you know, some of the letters that he's writing. He's talking about all of the wealth that I'm finding. Plow that into an effort to go back and take Jerusalem. So that dream still hasn't gone. And to some extent, you wonder whether that's, again, flush with success on the Iberian Peninsula. They're believing we could spearhead a new crusade. So the idea of taking back Jerusalem for Christianity hasn't gone away. And Columbus is perhaps envisaging these explorations to the new world and the gold and the silver that he's finding and everything else, specifically as a way to get Jerusalem back. It's still, that is still a dream, even if it's never leads to a numbered crusade that will actually assault Jerusalem.
1:16:49 Eleanor Janega? And certainly it is going to be, at the very least, a romantic gesture, I think, across the period. But I mean, can we talk a little bit about the Baltic Crusades?
1:17:01 Matt Lewis? All right. How can we not talk about the Baltic Crusades?
1:17:04 Eleanor Janega? I love a little Baltic Crusades.
1:17:05 Matt Lewis? Because we're going to get another crusading order up there. So the Teutonic Knights, again, much as we talked about the Hospitallists, they far outlive the crusading period in the way that the Templars don't manage to do. And that seems to be largely because they extricate themselves from the Holy Land completely, where the Hospitallists are saying, we will be the frontier of Christendom in the eastern Mediterranean. The Teutonic Knights seem much happier to say, and we'll be the frontier up in the far northeast because there's some pagans still here and we can keep them at bay. And also, you know, we'll push in and we'll Christianize them. And by the way, we might create a Teutonic state and get a kingdom out of all of this as well. But, but we're going to Christianize them.
1:17:45 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, so this is an interesting one because if we say that the Knights Templar Are essentially a corporation, wow, the Teutonic Knights, like they are doing it big, you know, down to the fact that all of their castles look the same and are made out of bricks. Like they have franchises, right? This is like the McDonald's of the crusading order, you know, you, you see one, you know what it looks like. Yep, those are Teutonic Knights, and they are inching their way up into the Baltic States. And listen, there is a lot of money to be made up there, really, really good for trappings. And yeah, to be fair, if like what holy war is for is Christianizing people, but these are not even people of the book. These are not even Abrahamic people. They're out here worshiping fire. They're out here
1:18:29 Eleanor Janega? worshiping a snake. I don't know, which, uh, to be fair, I think is insanely cool. Uh, and I think that there should be more fire worship. It's a shame that they actually got their way, but they're, they're making some good points, right? It's, this really does count as a group of people who are honest to God pagans.
1:18:47 Matt Lewis? And you can see in the early 13th century that popes are backing and sanctioning what is going on up there. And they're encouraging people to go against the, the pagan barbarians in the Baltics. As the crusading effort in the Near East is faltering and becoming really problematic, because they're clearly recognizing that what the Teutonic Knights are giving us up there is a bit of a success story in amongst the mess that's happening in the Near East. And you get the Baltic Crusades and around the Teutonic Knights become a bit of a magnet for people who don't make it to the Holy Land. So, yeah, Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry the Fourth of England, goes and cuts his teeth fighting with the Teutonic Knights. You know, he goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he's not there in a military capacity. He does his
1:19:29 Matt Lewis? fighting and he earns a reputation for himself up in the Baltics with the Teutonic Knights. And so presumably he's bringing back to England stories of this frontier, but the glorious work that is being done there that, that only fuels this idea that it needs to continue.
1:19:44 Eleanor Janega? Fundamentally, like, what if you're just not a hot weather person, right? Like, what if, what if you want to, uh, go on a holy war? It's a lot nearer by. You don't have to go and be getting sunstroke all the time. That is a frontier that exists that you can go involve yourself with.
1:20:03 Matt Lewis? And ultimately, the, the Teutonic Knights. Kind of by the 16th century, almost become a victim of their own success in that they have Christianized all the pagans that are left there and are just running a kingdom now. And they look an awful lot like a secular power and other secular powers around them are thinking, hang on, that land could be mine.
1:20:23 Eleanor Janega? Wait a minute.
1:20:24 Matt Lewis? How do you do this?
1:20:26 Eleanor Janega? And I mean, that they will be a victim of their own success in that way, you know, where it's like, well, what, what is the point of you? Right? It's the same thing that happens to the Knights Templar when you run out of pagans, when eventually we do have this decline in, you know, the Baltic states of the old pagan religions. And suddenly you've just got all of these brick castles around. Well, what's the point of that? You know?
1:20:50 Matt Lewis? And I think as the medieval period goes on as well, one of the, maybe the most insidious developments and the one that urban might actually frown on the most is this idea of, of having crusades against other Christians within Europe.
1:21:03 Eleanor Janega? So we have arguably one of our worst popes is fronting this up and that is Innocent the Third. And now, like, listen, medieval historians, we go back and forth on this because on the one hand, Innocent the Third, he is responsible for this huge transformation of the church into a legal structure. But what does he do in order to celebrate? He goes and points that legal structure at the wrong kind of Christians, which in this case are the good men and women of Languedoc, right? They use, the church uses the term cathar, and in particular Bernard of Clairvaux, who goes out there to do some like inquisition work, calls them the cathars. And they never call themselves that. They're just like,
1:21:46 Eleanor Janega? I don't know, I'm just a cool guy. Right? And what ends up happening is that they just find a bunch of people who are kind of like chilling out in the south of France and they've just got, you know, their own ideas about how things look. And that can mean, yes, that they perhaps believe in a dualistic idea of the universe. So there's this idea that the physical world is created by Satan. God's only created the spiritual. There are no doubt some people who believe in that at the time. There are also people like Beatrice of Plainsole, who appears to have wanted to shag a bit. And so starts calling herself a heretic because that's what all the guys who are hitting on her say that she should do if she wants to do that.
1:22:26 Eleanor Janega? Right. So it's a real mixed bag of people and the church goes in and absolutely massacres them.
1:22:32 Matt Lewis? We had a really interesting episode of Gone Medieval, probably a couple of years ago now. We talked to Mark Gregory Peg about the idea that Cathars didn't even exist, that there weren't these heretics that were lurking in the caves of the Long Dock and holding themselves up in fortresses, that this was never really a religious crusade. What this was a land grab because the area that that used to be acquitaine around the Long Dock was still kind of considered itself far too independent, was still bucking against the control from Paris that the French kings wanted. The Pope is so in the pocket of the French kings by this point. French popes and French kings thinking we want to unify France. What's the best way to reduce these people and force them to behave? We call them heretics and we call a crusade against them.
1:23:18 Matt Lewis? But that maybe there was never any religious justification to that. What this was, was a political maneuver to solidify the state of France.
1:23:26 Eleanor Janega? And, you know, indeed, if you look at who's leading it, right? Because here we've got Simon de Montfort, right? And he is casting his eyes around and he is noticing Raymond of Toulouse's territory. And it's looking pretty good. It's looking pretty good. Let's be so honest and for real about that. And he's like-
1:23:43 Matt Lewis? Toulouse has always been a tricky one, I think, because it controls those access over the Alps to Italy. Really important trade route and access to the coast. All these kinds of things that are politically important, but actually have nothing to do with religion.
1:23:53 Eleanor Janega? Exactly. And, you know, who doesn't want to control that? Oh, come on, south of France, right? Like, I'm trying to take it over right now. That's absolutely fine, right? And he's got this in because we're already saying, oh, gosh, wow. It really looks like these guys are the spawn of the devil. So, you know, off he pops. And he essentially just annexes this entire territory by 1215. He's got- The crown of Toulouse, essentially. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, this is an incredible amount of territory to suddenly take over about a four-year period. And it's massively wealthy. You know, things just grow down in the south of France. Like, you know, your peasants are living real good and nice, to the point that you can terrorize
1:24:37 Eleanor Janega? a bunch of them, massacre them all, and there are still going to be enough people to bring the harvest in. And essentially, that's what Simon is able to do.
1:24:44 Matt Lewis? Because Simon is swearing fealty to the King of France for this territory that he's now taken. And the French king is thinking, right, job done, that's under my control. And they've kind of boxed it up and put a bow on it and called it a crusade. It's an interesting legacy that people are still processing things in terms of crusading, that we can position this as a way to do it, or I need to emulate these things. And if there isn't a crusade in town, I'm going to have to find something and call it a crusade, or try and make it a crusade.
1:25:14 Eleanor Janega? Oh, yeah. And listen, there's going to be a few of those, right? So, for example, the papacy is constantly doing it against our homeboy, Frederick II, and all of his, you know, descendants as well. And there are good reasons for this. I mean, they are controlling a lot of territory around the papal states. The papal states don't love being sandwiched between the Holy Roman Empire and some more Holy Roman Empire. That's usually not something that they have to deal with. And so basically, any time one of Frederick VII's grandsons gets a little out of control, they're like, oh, that's crazy. Guess what? It's a crusade. Especially after the success with the Albigense crusade, you know?
1:25:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And we talked a bit when we thought about the causes of the crusade, about this idea of the Church wanting to reposition itself and refocus its secular authority. And you can almost still see that happening. They're still in this dispute with the Holy Roman Emperors about who is the real secular power. And that fight is still going on, and the Church is still willing to frame that as a crusade, even though you're now talking about the Holy Roman Emperor, you know, the Christian Emperor of the former Roman Empire.
1:26:29 Matt Lewis? We can have a crusade against him now because he's and it's almost like it's it's become an overused tool for popes to say, I don't like you crusade.
1:26:38 Eleanor Janega? Like, grow up, bro. Like, that is that is not that is not a reason to call a crusade. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
1:26:43 Matt Lewis? Like, you're just throwing that term around now.
1:26:45 Eleanor Janega? It's just like, you can't just because you want to do it, you can't just say that it's a crusade, right?
1:26:50 Matt Lewis? And I think another aspect of maybe the legacies of the crusade that we should think about is the formation of some of the institutions and the structures that will become Western states that are recognizable to us today. You know, you think of Richard the Lionheart famously didn't care about England, just used it to raise money. But there's a reason that he's able to do that because the structures are being created to allow something like the Saladin Thieves to be put in place. He has the administration that can go out and collect a tenth of what everybody has. And that's important because he needs it for the crusade. Louis the Ninth, when he doesn't do very well.
1:27:29 Matt Lewis? But he he understands his failure in terms of his own sin and the sin of his kingdom. So he comes home with this reforming zeal to redesign and restructure France to drive out corruption and to create this much more centralized state. So almost the legacy of the crusades is the institutionalization, the increased centralization of authority in states that will become what we recognize in Europe today, England, France, Germany.
1:27:56 Eleanor Janega? I mean, I would also say Venice. For me, Venice is like one of the real legacies of the crusade and the fact that they are able to get enough money and power together that they have their own empire, right? And that is pretty much down to the crusades and the fact that everyone is specifically going through Venice, they're looking to Venice to build ships for them. They are looking to Venice to provide instruments of credit, which is one of the only ways kind of around the idea that you shouldn't be charging interest. There Venice is like, oh, but what oh, but I'm just a little guy with a ship. And the church is like, oh, yeah, what's it for? Oh, it's for the crusades. Okay, yeah, fine.
1:28:38 Eleanor Janega? Fine. I guess that you are allowed to charge interest. And so this really is going to set them up as an incredible power into well into the early modern period. And, you know, also, I would argue, to a certain extent, that is. The model that the Templars are using a bit is this Venetian thing like, how are you getting to and from places? You're going to need a banking system that is going to lend you credit. You are going to need to think about how your travel plans work. So I think certainly the Templars are a really important part of the Crusades. I don't necessarily mean as Crusaders, but I mean as an institution within Europe.
1:29:19 Matt Lewis? And I guess one of the other places we need to think about the legacy of the Crusades is what was Byzantium. The first Crusade is kicked off in no small part because the Byzantine Empire calls for help from other Western Christians.
1:29:34 Matt Lewis? And they very cynically never deliver that. They go off and do something very different. We've seen the fourth Crusade sack Constantinople. And ultimately, I wouldn't, does the crusading period weaken the Byzantine Empire? By failing to support it, does it weaken it sufficiently that the Ottomans are then able to take it?
1:29:53 Eleanor Janega? I would say yes. Thank you. Thanks for going to my TED Talk. Yeah, I mean, I think that you're really on to something here because ultimately, what is Byzantium for? If it isn't actually, you know, one of the big hallmarks of Christendom, if it isn't this important outpost of Roman-ness and Christianity, if not even other Christians respect that, then that takes away a lot of the shine and it lessens their ability to argue for themselves, I think, as a polity.
1:30:26 Matt Lewis? Yeah. Because they're concerned about fighting on their eastern front and initially the Seljuk Turks, but then they will also face threats from a more cohesive Muslim presence in the Near East, and then the Mongols will arrive as well. But they don't only have to worry about that on their eastern front because not only are they not getting the support they really want from Western Christendom, but Western Christendom is actually eyeing them. You know, who breaches the walls of Constantinople that are unbreachable? It's Western Christians. It is not a Muslim army that gets through those walls. It's Latin Christians.
1:31:00 Eleanor Janega? I think that one of the big things that does happen with Latin Christians, if What we're thinking about is the legacy of Crusades is they do become a bit more aware of what is going on certainly in Central Asia. You know, suddenly Mongols are not just like a theoretical something that is happening out near India, right? And granted, that's because some of them show up in Hungary, et cetera. But you know, also it's this idea that there can be these diplomacies. There is this idea of, oh, there are knock on effects. When Mongols move around, then other people move around. Oh, what's a mom look? You know, these become things that people are really aware of in Europe. And so you do get an interesting interplay of cultural exchange as a result of that.
1:31:43 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And I think cultural exchange is one of the things that is quite tricky for us to pin down in terms of, is this a legacy of crusading? Or is this something that would have happened anyway as people come into contact with each other more increasingly? Because what we do see initially after the first contact of crusading armies in the Holy Land is this, what Christians will call the rediscovery of things that Muslims knew were never lost.
1:32:07 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
1:32:07 Matt Lewis? This idea that there's all these books and this ancient Roman and Greek philosophy and learning that begins to plow back into Europe and is being translated into Latin. And this idea of a Renaissance period in Europe then being fueled by the crusading. And I guess it's hard, it definitely has an impact, but is that just because of crusading? Or would that have happened anyway as trade happened and as people just lived next to each other for long enough? Maybe it happens faster. Maybe the Crusades caused it to happen in a smash rather than a smooth process. But there is nevertheless this big cultural exchange that goes on during this period.
1:32:48 Matt Lewis? And I guess before we finish, you know, do we want to think about the modern legacies of crusading as it exists in the world today, which let's be frank, can be a tricky conversation to have, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it.
1:33:01 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, like, do I want to think about it? No. Am I forced to every day? Yes. Because I think, you know, especially in kind of like the 19th century and the early 20th century in particular, there comes about this really Kind of silly and simplistic way of talking about the Crusades, which is there's the whole clash of civilizations thing. You know, this idea that, oh, the Muslims and Christians have always been at war with each other. Look at the Crusades and it's like, baby, what do you mean by Christian? What do you mean by Muslim? What does any of this mean? Right? It's and that is extrapolated from especially when we see things like, you know, the friction between, for example, yeah, again, the Ottoman Turks and us in World War I.
1:33:45 Eleanor Janega? You know, whatever has happened more recently in, you know, the Muslim world, you know, with like the rise of Wahhabism and these ideals of, you know, more pointed cultural friction, I suppose. But you really can't look at the medieval Crusades in any honesty and think that that is true. Like, honestly.
1:34:11 Matt Lewis? No, I think this revival that happens in the 19th century, it's no coincidence that it happens around the same time as imperialism. And we've talked a lot about how crusading can be repurposed for political and territorial gain. And I think that's what's happening in the 19th century. People are positioning things as crusades that aren't. And I think it's interesting that right up to the modern day, you think there's examples all the way through the 20th century of things that are framed as a crusade. Was the Second World War a crusade against Nazism? It becomes a word that is used to describe any struggle against something that you consider to be bad. You know, governments have a crusade to build housing. Is that a crusade?
1:34:48 Eleanor Janega? Listen, I think that I'm going to steal your point because I've heard you say this, and I think it's such a good one. You know, when you use the word crusade, it is essentially interchangeable with the word jihad. And would you go around throwing that around in the same way? Just a question.
1:35:06 Matt Lewis? I mean, jihad has several meanings as well that crusade simply doesn't. It can be about the internal struggle for a Muslim to be a better Muslim, as well as the external one. And that external one can be divided into a political approach and a military approach. But we tend to think of the word jihad meaning the Islamic military efforts against other religions. And it's almost like we use crusading to be a good thing, but we never use the word jihad to mean a good thing. And I think. I think a lot of particularly Western Christian people associate jihad with being a bad thing.
1:35:42 Eleanor Janega? Listen, ask any of the Christians who were living in Antioch during the siege, how they feel about Crusaders is all I would say, you know.
1:35:51 Matt Lewis? I think this has been a fairly fascinating exploration of some of the legacies of crusade, which are, I mean, they're immediate, but they're also persistent. They exist into today, don't they? We've seen so many different ways in which crusading and their crusading attitudes have shaped huge parts of the world right up until today.
1:36:11 Eleanor Janega? Absolutely. I don't think that there is any way to understand our world without understanding the Crusades as a whole. It's just that there's so much to see there. I don't know if we'll ever really get to the bottom of it, which is why we can continue having fun conversations like this.
1:36:28 Matt Lewis? Wow, we made it. Our odyssey through the history of the Crusades has come to an end. From the fields of Clermont in 1095 to the ruins of Acre in 1291, we've traced nearly two centuries of faith, ambition, slaughter and catastrophe. We've seen how a movement born of pilgrimage, piety and papal reform exploded into the first crusade, how fragile crusader kingdoms were carved out and contested by kings, queens and sultans, how crusading unraveled before the walls of Constantinople, and how, in the end, forces far beyond Western Europe swept the crusader states from the Eastern Mediterranean altogether.
1:37:10 Matt Lewis? If there's one thing this journey has shown us, it's that the Crusades were never simply a clash of civilizations pitting Muslims against Christians. They were a tangled web of politics, a diplomatic chess game, a commercial opportunity and a medieval epic that reshaped Europe and the wider world in ways that lasted far beyond the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
1:37:40 Matt Lewis? Thank you so much for listening and joining us on this ride. And thanks to Dr Nicholas Morton again for joining me earlier in this episode. If you want to find out more, then do go and preorder his new book, The Crusader Storm, A Global History of the Wars for the Middle East. And if this series has whetted your appetite, you can dive back into our back catalogue, where we've explored everything from the Albigensian Crusade, to the campaigns of the Teutonic Knights, and the rise of Saladin. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.
1:38:25 Matt Lewis? You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
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