Transcript for:
Crusades Overview and Impact

thank you very much for coming back on the show it's a big subject one of the biggest when you set out to write about the crusades are you mindful of what they mean to people today this is not just a kind of abstract sort of self-contained bit of medieval history i'm always interested in topics that can draw like the middle ages together with the modern so things that people will have heard of you know to put it at its simplest and i think crusades is one of those terms that's just bled into our vocabulary today so while i've been writing i've had a google alert for crusades and every day it comes up with some really amazing stuff so you know you get political stuff like boris johnson is on a crusade to hire more police officers or whatever or um you know the chinese are on a crusade to i don't know destroy the american economy or whatever it may be one came through this week from a website which said dr jen gunter is on a crusade to save your vagina and i mean like that is not an appropriate mental image but so it shows you the way that crusaders bled into our language it also has less humorous um political implications and uses so the alt-right we know um the crusade is an absolute catnip for the alt-right and if you look at for example the manifesto of the guy who shot up the mosques in christchurch earlier this year full of crusades references he dorbed crusader battles all over the weapons he was using the manifesto said things like what would pope urban the second do and on the on the other side if you like when isis affiliated groups bombed hotels and churches in sri lanka this easter again you know the statements taking credit for it said things like we've attacked citizens of the crusader coalition on their infidel holiday so what that says to you is that there are people in this world who believe that in some sense the crusades are still continuing and for that reason if none other i think it's worth considering and writing about what the crusades were really about um partly so we can understand the difference between the history and and what's happening today and partly to say we can see that this is really something that doesn't bear repeating what do people what do people mean by the crusades well if you've been around at the time of the crusade so we're talking about now roughly speaking is from the end of the 11th century um 1090s you could you could date it earlier to 1060s as i do in the book through to i finished a story in 1492 in end of the 15th century nobody at that time was talking about going on crusades you know it's it's quite a historian's term however they knew very well what a crusader was so this a crusader was somebody who'd responded to the call of the papacy the call of a pope to go and fight a holy war in the name of christ against the enemies of the church now the beginning of the period that meant uh well in the case the first crusade marching overland from western europe to constantinople modern istanbul to assist the byzantine emperor there in his war against the turks who were dismembering piece by piece byzantine uh territories in asia minor and then marching on to jerusalem to quote unquote liberate jerusalem from islamic rule that's the sort of center piece of the crusades jerusalem was taking 1099 a series of crusader states were set up in what's now syria lebanon palestine israel but there were other crusading arenas as well so there were holy wars being fought between christian powers and islamic powers in modern spain and portugal there were wars being fought against um pagans in the baltic there was the albigensian crusade against cathar heretics in southern france there were wars it fought in egypt in north africa there were eventually by the time you get towards the the high middle ages and the end of the middle ages there are wars being fought between rival christian powers all over europe that are being called crusades you could sort of just apply to the pope and have your wall rubber stamped as a crusade and that gave it some spiritual legitimacy or or apparent validity um that it might otherwise have lacked so the idea of the crusade in short i guess is is about fighting the perceived enemies of the church um what was clearer was what a crusader was now if you'd agreed to join in one of these wars whichever it might be you took a formal vow that you were going to go on on crusade your reward for doing so was remission of sins in other words all the sins that you committed on earth if you confess them then by going on crusade or going to fight for for the church you would be excuse those sins so your passage to heaven would be would be made much speedier than it would have been otherwise uh you were marked out as a crusader by having sewn or pinned onto your clothes a cross made of cloth or in some cases if you if you're feeling pretty uh extremely bad you might decide to carve the uh the cross into your forehead or brand it on your skin um these are all sort of possibilities but but the idea is in latin the word crucifignati one signed with the cross and everybody knew what a crusader looked like they didn't all look the same you know our image today is of a templar night usually when we think about crusaders that's not not and we can talk a bit about this but that's not at all what all crusaders looked like however it was pretty obvious um to anyone at the time who was a crusader and who wasn't why does why does crusading happen why does it start as usual you're asking the the simple questions but they are the most common with the most complex answers so if you want to usually when people tell the story of the crusades they start with pope urban ii at claremont in france 1095 and he just apparently out of nowhere stands up and says right lads i've got an idea we're going to head to constantinople in jerusalem liberate constantinople liberate jerusalem and the reward will be you know remission of sins you'll find it in heaven and often that seems very weird and and seems to be just an illustration of how bizarre medieval people were actually of course if you if you look at the history of crusading you see something rather different um during the sort of 1060s 1070s 1080s a lot of different sort of political and military and and theological um strands all sort of coalesced and came together it was undoubtedly true that the byzantine empire was under threat from turkic warlords pushing westwards through asia minor um the byzantine emperor had or succession of emperors had made appeals to the west to christians the west saying come and help us there was also the fact that there was a schism between the eastern and western churches and a succession of popes had scratched their heads over ways that this schism this falling out could be um could be fixed could be reconciled in western europe within western christendom there was similarly a long history of political tension between popes on the one hand and secular rulers particularly you know german emperors on the other and there were there was a need to reconcile that situation in spain and portugal there had been wars between christian powers and islamic powers going on you know from the 1060s you know clashes all over you know you could date clashes between islamic powers and christian powers in spain as far back as the eighth century if you really wanted to um in sicily they'd been you know the normans had arrived in sicily and conquered sicily from the arabs and you know the the islamic take on the beginning of the crusades is actually that if you look around the mediterranean in 1060s 1070s you see all over the place clashes between christian and muslim powers and what happens in the 1090s is that these are sort of drawn together and given us a unifying framework by urban ii so there are all of these different strands coming together but something definitely happens in the 1090s is that there's another major appeal from byzantium to the west urban ii becomes pope and really arrives as you know in as pope with a very strong urge to do something about both schism between east western church and and political tensions within western christendom and you have he latches on to the idea of getting people to go and fight in the name of christ as as a solution for all of these problems you know you can you can address all of these problems in one go if you call for a mass uh military expedition under the banner of the papacy i mean are there mercenaries why people are going i mean is there a sense that you're going to benefit not just in the afterlife but in the present life as well yeah i think a lot of people went crusading with a whole sort of ragtag mixed bag of motivations they carried with them remission of sins might be very important and and was very important to a lot of people it was a very appealing idea that you could sort of wipe the slate clean and start again if you went on on this this journey i think there's a in the late 11th century there is a sort of acquisitive military class of knights whose whole stock in trade is going and fighting and and you know that's how you earned your living you fought because you got paid you fought because you collected booty and and this seemed like a promising place to go a lot of the crusaders or the leaders of the crusade found that eventually when they when the crusader state states in the east was set up that um here was sort of virgin territory that could be carved into western-style feudal little blocks you know and so you had kings and counts and princes and um all the sort of the aristocratic ranks that were familiar from western europe and the land that came with it um so and throughout the history of crusading you do see a lot of people who go crusading because there's money in it i mean my favorite of those i think after the first crusade the beginning of the 12th century um the first west major western king to visit the crusader states to visit the east is a governed sigurd the first king of norway city the first king of norway was a christian but he was also essentially a sort of late period viking and his you know stocking trade of the vikings as you know very well is uh go forth and plunder sigurd the first of all of cigarette first of norway became king at the age of 13. his brother was coking decided that norway wasn't big enough for the two of them so he set off with so the bards tell us um 60 ships 10 000 men probably not quite that many and went on this incredible plundering mission around well he went to england then france and then stopped off all the way down the coast of what's now spain and portugal plundering as he went attacking muslim townsfolk pirates you name it he'd attack them take their ships take their gold take their women move on and through the straits of gibraltar did the same in the balearic islands menorca formentera stopped off in sicily partied a bit with the king of sicily another you know young roger the second sicily by the time he wound up in the holy land helped with the siege of sidon traveled to jerusalem was given a little fragment of the of christ's cross by the time he left the holy land heading for constantinople they had so much booty that they were attaching it to the masts and the sails of the ships and as glinting as the sun and the sun as they went so i think you know you look at a character like sigurd of norway or later in the period the merchants from venice and pisa and genoa who went crusading because they could set themselves up in newly conquered crusader cities and have extremely lucrative trading privileges there you can look at people like that and say probably the primary motivation for going crusading was uh gold was wealth but i don't think you can say it was the only motivation because of course we're dealing with a much more religious society than we live in today in the west and uh it's always very hard to untangle people's motivations the analogy i use usually is uh you've never been to a pub and sat next to the kind of the boar who tells you that the iraq war was all about the oil right and and you think about that and say well i'm sure there was a little bit maybe even a lot bit uh of the motivation of the second gulf war had to do with oil but you can't disentangle that from george w bush's uh deeply held christian faith you know people like cheney and rumsfeld knew that if you put biblical slogans on papers that went on w's desk he was more likely to read them his sort of his christianity played a role his uh his genuine sort of attachment to kind of neo-liberal democratic ideas or at least it's not just about the oil and in the same way in the crusades it's not never just about the gold so it sounds to me like you're saying that there is something big going on here i mean obviously 12th century societies 11th century societies didn't need much cause to go to war against each other but there is a bigger idea here happening yeah i think that's fair and i think that um if you take away the brand of the crusade as as we've quite often attached it as historians but as has also existed at the time um [Music] you could see that there had been clashes for example spain and portugal was a great example there'd been clashes between muslim and christian powers in spain and portugal for not just decades but for centuries before the crusading period um you know when gibbon wrote about this you know he traced the history all the way back to the 8th century [Music] so when we look at the crusading period we're often applying this this idea to wars that would probably have been going on anyway of course there'd have been clashes between christian powers and muslim powers in spain and modern spain and portugal that's just the way that geography had dictated it however of course once once the idea of crusading is out there in the wild it you have a feedback loop between um motivation and political fact and and and wars that would have been going on anyway are probably exacerbated by the fact of the crusade or legitimized or justified you see what i mean so the two things enter into a relationship with one another how many crusades were there well the numbering of the crusades uh is is a bit of a sticky issue people usually give up after five okay and so often people say oh there are eight or nine numbered crusades which went to mostly aimed towards jerusalem even if they didn't get there i mean we were in pretty good agreement up to the fifth okay and then they start to get other titles like the barons crusade or the crusade of louis the ninth and and even i sometimes lose track of why was that the seventh or the eighth the point is there were tons and tons of them and those were just the crusades of the east right dan jones you're the expert let's go through the crusades start at number one what happened um potted history of the first crusade 1095 urban ii stands up and claremont says let's go fight we're going to go to constantinople and we're going to help the byzantine empire which is under attack from turkish warlords heading to asia minor and then we're going to go on and we're going to take jerusalem and this sounds like a crazy scheme um in many ways it is a crazy scheme um but somehow or other it works there are various waves of people set off from western europe the first known as the people's crusade led by a man called peter the hermit a sort of a dem a shabby demagogue who has the rare ability to rouse the bassist instincts in people and give it the veneer or the patina of respectability a sort of um sackcloth wearing dominic cummings if you like it bounces along and and [Music] rowdy and uh and intemperate people find him um very charming and and follow him the people's crusade sets off through the rhineland um the terrible pogroms and massacres of jewish people in cities like mainz and verms uh the the this rabble very unsuited to fighting most of them head off down the danube go through the balkans wind up in constantinople heavily depleted because along the way they've they've usually annoyed everybody who's territory they've gone through and been periodically massacred themselves and they wind up in contact with people in pretty bad shape behind them comes a much more organized wave of crusaders sometimes called the princes crusade this is led by aristocratic people um quite a lot of normans of southern italy are involved men like beaumont of toronto southern french lords like raymond of toulouse there's a papal legate adamawa of lapui it's a bit more organized this is the sort of crusade that urban ii had in mind people who were competent and capable and able to fight well they set off along broadly the same route and danube through the balkans comes down to nepal and then all the crusaders sort of a mass in constantinople crossed the bosphorus and aided with some byzantine military advisers uh head out into turkish-held asia minor and i suspect that the emperor alexis konninos didn't think he'd see them again however uh miraculously as it appeared to them they survived two great military engagements one at an ico and at durham 1097. they made it through asia minor came down out of the mountains into northern syria besieged the great city of antioch managed to take antioch incredible military feed were then themselves besieged in antioch and fought off their besiegers marched down the coast um july 1099 besieged jerusalem itself and took jerusalem and that that's the sort of that was the miraculous end goal of of the first crusade achieved um incredible absolutely incredible urban seven uh sorry urban ii never heard about it because he died before news of the fall of jerusalem could reach him however this crazy mission that he'd preached in 1095 four years late nearly four years later could somehow come to fruition in some ways it would have been better for everybody if it had failed in asia minor because now having taken jerusalem jerusalem had to be defended jerusalem the place of christ's ministry of his death of his resurrection um the center of the world if you look at medieval maps of the time could not be lost and that once had been taken so around jerusalem and and other cities in the region that had been conquered were set up a series of crusader states the kingdom of jerusalem the county of tripoli the county of odessa the principality of antioch in the north and from this point on the story of the crusades is really one of desperate attempts to resupply to fortify to to embed new waves of settlers and to revenge um on those periods on those occasions when um important parts of these crusader states were conquered i should quickly ask did this come at a bad time for the islamic world i mean was that was was there an element of luck involved was there a crisis that meant that the forces of of uh the caliphate were less likely to be able to fight back when you read the islamic sources uh trying to make sense of the first crusade um it's very strike two things are very striking the first is that they they tend to view it in a much broader context than the christian sources who see this as a one-off uh god sent miracle ibana ibanathir the great iraqi chronicler of the crusading period says this was all part of a very strange phenomenon where the christian powers were were on the march against muslim powers across the mediterranean but he specifically and other chroniclers specifically attribute the success of the first crusade to the um to the fractured um dis unified nature of the islamic world of the near east you had the great seljuk empire a sort of turkic sunni empire ruled from capitals including merv and baghdad was splintering and weakening and authority was was falling apart and and various different rival atabeks and emirs ruling rival cities mosul and damascus and aleppo were all at war with each other to the south you had the fatimid caliphate uh based in cairo and shiite uh implacably opposed to the sunni turks further north these two were enemies as well and so the explanation given a lot of islamic sources is because the because the muslim world was in a state of disunity the franks as they call them the french uh marched in and took advantage of that situation so that that's absolutely the way it's uh it's understood um in those narratives second crusade we mentioned the county of odessa odessa had been set up um in fact it was the first of the of the crusader states to be set up during the first crusade but in 1144 it was uh the capital city odessa and much territory around it was taken by zengi a fierce and extremely violent and drunken warlord news of this got back to the west where crusading sort of enthusiasm had really been dipping in the centuries following the first crusade but shock horror when a death fell a crusade was organized on the principle largely that the loss of odessa demonstrated how sort of weak and sort so lily livered the new generation of uh of rulers in the west have become in comparison to their their brave and um and bold forefathers the crusade was principally led by two kings louis vii of france and conrad the third the german king um both of them led armies which went deliberately in the footsteps of their forefathers they tried to go over land when the sea route might have been a better idea uh two constant they tried to go overland when a sea route might have been a better idea to constantinople across the bosphorus through asia minor antioch down to jerusalem same route as the first crusaders terrible terrible idea absolutely terrible idea because for among many other reasons louis vii for conrad the third were not a patch on the leaders of the first crusade louis vii in particular his wife elena of aquitaine described him as more a monk than a king and he was useless as a as a military leader in that context um the turks of asia minor had their stuff together they were much more organized than they had been in the 1090s and so the armies of the second crusade were butchered and very lucky to make it to the holy land at all by the time they got there edessa was long gone zengi was dead and they were scratching their heads as to what earth they were going to do so a sort of ham-fisted plot or plan of action was cooked up by which they were just going to go and attack damascus why damascus well strategically quite important city very important city very wealthy but um not the sort of place you go and besieged just with a plan worked out on the back of a packet um the siege of damascus was an absolute uh fiasco it was over within a week and the crusade broke up in some acrimony louis v france stayed in holy land for a bit touring the shrines but he'd fallen out massively with his wife elena of aquitaine who was subsequently accused of having an affair with her uncle prince of antioch by the time they go back to the west they were ready to be divorced and well english and french history took a different course because of that um not uh a crusade to be proud of the one interest in fact there were two interesting achievements in the second crusade the first was the english and flemish crusaders who did take a sea route rather than the overland route on their way round what's now portugal conquered the significant and very wealthy islamic city of lisbon we call it lisbon now and that was a major gain for the second crusade in 1147. in some ways even more important was the fact that there were some german nobles in saxony in 1147 who decided they didn't really fancy the trip to jerusalem and they petitioned the pope successfully to be allowed to attack non-christians closer to home pagan people in the baltic states and the wendish crusade as it's known as a minor crusade which which took place in 1147 1148 started a pattern of crusading against against baltic pagans eventually in latvia lithuania estonia up to finland which would continue for hundreds of years and become a major major crusading arena particularly in the later middle ages so that probably was the the most important lasting outcome of the second crusade not the fiasco in the holy lands number three third chris everyone knows about the third crusade this is richard the lionheart and saladin if you close your eyes and think of a crusade if you ever do such a thing it's probably the third crusade you're thinking about 1187 city of jerusalem was taken by saladin the great kurdish general who'd risen become sultan of egypt and syria united the islamic world under sunni rule crushed the fatimid caliphate um deposed the last caliph and was now taking aim under the banner of jihad against the the christians of the crusader states destroyed a crusader army at the battle of hattin on the 4th of july 1187 subsequently marched on jerusalem and took it jerusalem fell the relic of the true cross was captured the king of jerusalem was captured seismic shock went through the christian world particularly in the west and kings including philip augustus of france philip ii france and richard the first the new king of england richard the lionheart answered the call to crusade turned their kingdoms over to preparing for war sales to the holy land uh successfully besieged the city of akka or acre which had become uh which would become the cap new capital of the the kingdom of jerusalem uh went on a you know a march down the coast fighting saladin's armies all the way richard's twice approached jerusalem with the intention of taking it back from saladin and twice realized he didn't have the numbers to do it so eventually broke at peace with saladin uh took his ships and went home um a heroic sort of legend sprang up around the third crusade almost from the minute it was taking place i mean both richard and saladin surrounded themselves with people whom they knew were going to write their stories and and write them up in the most kind of chivalric and um and heroic way imaginable i it's a very familiar story and actually one of the fun things i i did when i was writing crusaders was to take a slightly different approach to it so i discovered a character called margaret of beverly well i came across i didn't discover and scholars knew about her but no one's really written about her at any any length in a popular book about the crusades margaret beverly gives you a great view of the third crusade because she's a sort of yorkshire lass who goes on pilgrimage to jerusalem and gets stuck in jerusalem when saladin's armies are outside the wars and the account of her terrible time during the third crusade has her on the wall to jerusalem with a slingshot throwing stones at saladin's army and wearing a cooking pot for a helmet on her head and and she has the most incredible adventures around the holy land so when i was writing about the third crusade i really tried hard to give a a woman's view of what the third crusade was all about so that was that was that was fun fourth crusade fourth crusade absolute joke fourth crusade i mean really an extraordinary event that um we don't talk about the fourth crusade too much because it was extremely disreputable um at every stage in the right at the end of the 12th century after the third crusade had just sort of narrowly failed to take jerusalem um a new crusade was was launched and it was it was sort of taken up relatively enthusiastically by a small group of french lords but it was very clear that there weren't going to be any kings this time going crusading so this group of french lords scratched their heads a bit and thought how are we going to get armies ourselves to the holy land so they went to venice greatest sort of ship uh merchant republic um of the of the adriatic and they broken a deal with the rulers of venice and principally the 90 year old blind dodger of venice enrique dandelo by which venice would build them sufficient ships to carry a vast army um the secret destination was alexandria in in northern egypt from from which they then proceed onto jerusalem so for a year venice and all its its you know its laborers and its shipbuilders and its merchants toiled to prepare a crusading fleet a year later when they had indeed prepared sort of a hundred odd ships galleys and provisioned them sufficiently for a major army to go to the holy land the french turned up and they had barely a third of the number of people that they thought they'd been able to raise they had nothing like the amount of money that they were in the hole for to the venetians and so they all looked at each other and realized that there was only one possible outcome and that was that the venetians were now going to be in charge of the crusade and so instead of going to alexandria and on to jerusalem the crusading fleet left venice went to the croatian coast the city of zara where a christian crusading population hung like crosses from the walls and said we're crusaders too the venetians didn't care they had beef with the citizens of zara they thought they should be obedient to venice instead of hungary and so they pillaged a christian major christian city burned half of it to the ground and left out they then went on to an even bigger christian city the city of constantinople and through a series of sort of torturous politics involving rival claimants to the imperial throne in constantinople um you ended up with the rather shameful sight in 1204 of the crusaders on the fourth crusade scaling the walls of constantinople invading the city pillaging it burning acres of it to the ground i mean if if anyone's watched the end of game of thrones you remember dragons over king's landing that's what we're talking about in the fourth crusade um the venetians very happily for them made their money back probably several times over and if you go to venice to mark's basilica today you can still see the great bronze horses that they nicked from constantinople and took back to venice enrico dandelo the blind 90-something year old dodger died in constantinople in 1205 and was the only person ever i think to be buried in the hogia sofia this spelled really the end for the byzantine greek empire a latin emperor of constantinople baldwin of flanders was installed and then he had a series of sort of rather tin pot latin emperors before a weak and um and fairly unstable byzantine restoration the the upshot of the fourth crusade was the destruction of a christian empire the um the destruction of two very important one extremely important christian cities absolutely no crusading done against any muslim enemies at all save for a few lords like um simon democrat the elder and others who who realized pretty early on the way the wind was blowing left the crusade and went themselves on a sort of armed pilgrimage to the holy land but nothing of any any serious significance um a total disaster a total fiasco and in the words of one greek chronicle at the time absolutely shameful the fifth crusade early 13th century um pope innocent iii great reforming pope legalist a great believer in the the uh the spiritual supremacy and the political supremacy of the roman church uh decided that the fourth crusade simply wouldn't do and the fact that they'd gone and burned constantinople really wasn't um wasn't very becoming of of of the latins people of the roman church so uh organized although he didn't live to see it completed a great crusade that would weaken the uh the sultans of egypt who were controlling jerusalem by attacking them in their own backyard so the fifth crusade took aim at the city of damieta in the nile delta extraordinary accounts of of the siege of damietto which one for months and months and months eventually damieta was taken by the uh by the crusaders they sat in damietta for a bit and then decided to march on cairo march up the nile to cairo absolutely um dreadful decision to take because they didn't know anything about the nile didn't understand how it flooded they didn't understand how it was controlled and the uh the sultan of the time al camille allowed the crusaders to march up the nile and as soon as they got so far they couldn't turn back uh opened all the sluice gates and canals that allowed the controlled the flow of water out of the nile into fields flooded all the land around and then left the crusaders either to drown or beg for his assistance in leaving kicked him out of damieta and uh once again the just as with the fourth crusade you know a major expedition of the church had ended in very little other than um than waste death and um embarrassment i suppose that was the fifth crusade now after the fifth crusade the numbers get a little bit sticky because some time had elapsed since jerusalem had been lost you know a couple of generations the examples of the fourth and fifth crusades were sufficient to illustrate the the grievous difficulty um of the ambition of retaking jerusalem and so you really see throughout the 13th century crusading start to fragment now much of that is down to innocent iii himself who throughout his papacy at the beginning of the 13th century made it his business to really expand the institution of the crusade so instead of just saying like crusading is for uh for going and taking aim at jerusalem and lands close by and to sanctify fighting in spain and portugal innocent um gave his permission for an escalation in fighting against the pagans in the baltic innocent um declared that wars against cathar heretics in southern france which were really being fought to to increase the power of the french crown over southern french lords who had traditionally been independent innocent declared that that was a crusade there were crusades i mean i think over the course of his papers the innocent preached seven or eight crusades um not one of which actually went anywhere near jerusalem i mean unless you count the fifth ending up in alexandria in damieta i'm sorry by the the end of innocence papacy therefore crusading had been extended but it also been um weakened somewhat it had been diffused and and during the 13th century that process continued a pace so there was diminishing support for the crusader states of the east the defense of those was left up to military orders like the templars the hospitals the teutonic knights crusading was much easier to do closer to home and popes were starting to use crusade just as a weapon against enemies wherever they could be found frequently christian enemies so the most ridiculous example of this that you see is uh the wars between the papacy and the home stuff and the german emperors and particularly the great holy roman emperor and king of sicily frederick the second homestuffin who was supposed to go on the fifth crusade made lots of excuses and didn't uh eventually turned up in the holy land in 1229 and through his friendship with the sultan al camille and his his his great understanding of islamic culture thanks to his his upbringing on sicily negotiated a piece by which jerusalem was mostly returned to christian rule for nearly 15 years um however because frederick constable had fallen out with successive popes he did this while excommunicated from the church so um well i'd like to say that had frederick honestly haven't been alive today and brought about the sort of peace he did in the middle east they would have given him the nobel peace prize but in the middle ages just because of his friendship with sultans and his antipathy um with popes they excommunicated him four times and eventually drove him to his death and i noticed your book goes up until the 15th century why do you extend that far forward is it because you look behind some of the impulses for example the portuguese they start creeping down the coast of africa they are influenced by crusading ideology well some histories quite a lot of histories of crusading finish the story in 1291 1291 akka acre the capital city of kingdom of jerusalem was lost to the mamluks slave soldier cast uh turkic by origin but who'd risen up to take political control in egypt and syria they swept the crusader states effectively into the sea and the kingdom of jerusalem became a rump state in exile on the island of cyprus in retrospect it's clear that the crusader states were never revived in any meaningful form and that jerusalem was was long lost now people didn't have the benefit of hindsight of course at the time so i think there's there's certainly good reasons to continue the story of crusading past the los vaca in 1291 into the early 14th century when grand plans by people like marina cenudo of venice were being drawn up for for a big new crusade on the scale of the first second third crusades the wars of the reconquista were continuing and continued all the way up until 1492 when the last the last muslim ruler of granada was was handed over the keys to alhambra to the catholic monarchs ferdinand and isabella um there are continuing wars right into the 15th century the teutonic knights are still fighting pagans and henry bollingbrook future henry iv of england went fighting a couple of seasons with the teutonic knights when he was a young man um crusades were being declared willy-nilly you know john of gaunt bolenbrook's father when he was fighting down in castile and and portugal had his war against other christian kings declared a crusade so i think i'm writing about crusaders and there is absolutely no question that in the 15th century there were tons of people who consider themselves crusaders indeed well into the 16th century you know christians fighting against the ottomans on in eastern europe and um you know towards the the age of the ottoman empire they consider themselves crusaders 1798 you could take the story up to if you wanted with napoleon bonaparte stopping in malta and getting rid of the last you know vestiges of the hospital as you know crusading military order we can take the story as far as we want i finished crusaders the book in 1492 because i think this moment of the end of the wreck on keister is very important it's important partly because the last rule of a significant islamic power on mainland europe is extinguished but also because there's the rather neat fact that in the crowd watching the alhambra being surrendered on the 1st of january 1492 is a young man called christopher columbus and columbus then sets out across the atlantic and we know the story of columbus's um encounters with the new world very well but columbus comes back you know writing these wide-eyed letters saying you'll never guess what i've just found over there there's a whole bunch of other non-christian people who can convert or kill and a load of their stuff that we can plunder and so it seems to me that all of these essential energies that have gone into crusading throughout the earlier or throughout the middle ages were now transferred if you like westwards and all of that sort of militant christian acquisitiveness and went across the atlantic instead of towards jerusalem do the crusades matter more today in the west than the memory of them or the myths about them or in the east in the islamic world there are profoundly different approaches to thinking about the crusades between this western christian world i think and the the modern islamic world um we overuse the word crusade massively in the west today i think we have a very um uh elevated and absurdly elevated view at times of as to how important the crusades were to the rest of the world uh clearly very important to the culture of medieval europe and and the sort of the the politics and and military uh events in western europe however if you look at it from an eastern perspective from an islamic perspective there was a lot more going on during the middle ages than the franks occasionally turning up and sort of biting you like it's an annoying gnat i mean besides the crusader states within the broader islamic world was absolutely tiny and the arrival of sort of major crusades very sporadic once every couple of generations for a large part the net legacy of crusading was relatively slight i mean if you go to jerusalem even today you still won't see a great deal i mean you see there are crusader castles in israel in syria of course great castle like cractus chevalier and the the ruins of chateau bellerin or whatever but really the legacy is not profound um in the islamic world with maybe one exception um which is to say that it's very easily weaponized um and is very readily weaponized today by groups like al-qaeda and isis because it has enormous propaganda value as as a historical event that appears to show permanent division between the western christian world and the eastern islamic world and it appears to show us a historical continuum that can be mapped on to the world today um that's stupid propaganda obviously um the the real story if you actually look at it of relations between the islamic world and the western christian world during the middle ages is the boring stuff of people living and surviving side by side and trading with one another and generally getting on okay and exchanging knowledge and um and skills and people we don't like to to concentrate on that because it's not the stuff of rollicking great battles and um and dramatic events i think it's also important to say that during the the middle ages um the islamic world was much more um driven by sectarian divides between sunni and shia arab and turk just as today you know the the rivalry between iran and saudi arabia sunni and shia are equally if not more significant than um relations between islam in the west so we can overrate the importance of the crusades but that said given that crusading is such catnip to the alt-right such catnip to islamist terrorists it clearly hasn't gone away and as long as there are people who consider themselves crusaders then this story is is going to be in our lives don jones thank you very much welcome to the history hit youtube channel which we are relaunching we've got all the best exclusive content going straight to this history hit youtube channel and you can find out for example what on earth i'm standing at the top of this mast you should probably subscribe