Understanding the Crusades and Their Impact

And, ladies and gentlemen, I'm trying not to say folks all the time, we're back for the third lecture in week slash module five on Islamic expansion and the Crusades. This is the lecture on the Crusades proper, which I guess I have to push the button there. Anyway, all right, some of this is a little bit of this review. I did some of this. last time with the crusades prelude sending the stage so you kind of understand because the crusades very important they resonate down to this day there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation about them you know the difference misinformation is when you inform someone sort of accidentally of the wrong data or you you give them the wrong information disinformation is when you per you intentionally intend to deceive people by giving out the wrong information. And gee, neither one of those things happens, does it? Look, every historian comes at it from their own perspective. So thus, in a sense, every historian is biased. There's no such thing as 100% objective data. So, you know, your best bet, like with a lot of things, like with politics, like with whether or not, you know, certain vaccines are okay, whether or not, whatever, what kind of gas to put in your vehicle, what kind of vehicle to die. whatever what school to go to your best bet is to get information from various sources so you can get a balanced view and not just from one you know not just from right-wing sources or left-wing sources you know which which a lot of people in our country do the crusades you know having been in islamic history here for a while and having dealt with the crusades not just academically but excuse me in the body politic in the in the public arena sphere because i you I write articles and books and things like that. Excuse me. I can tell you that there are very few topics that are as tendentious, that is partisan, that people use for partisan purposes. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I have the belches for some reason. It only happens when I get online. I think it's psychosomatic. Very few topics that are as polarizing, I guess you can say, as the Crusades. And there's a lot of misinformation and indeed disinformation about them. So I try to present a balanced view here, but I try to correct some of the crazy one-sided perspectives that we get. So anyway, I set the stage with some of the prelude stuff last time. Here's a little bit more before we get into the actual crusade. So the crusades are often presented as, you know, a bunch of bloodthirsty Christians went out and started killing people for no good reason. You know, as if. You know, everybody in the Middle East and particularly the Holy Land was sitting around just sipping tea at the local, tea or coffee, but they drink a lot of tea in certain parts. When, you know, a bunch of really mad Catholics showed up and started cutting off their heads. Well, the actual background is a little bit more complex than that. So, for instance, here's the Christian world in about 600 AD. So, you know, a hundred. 25 years or so after the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire is still there. But regardless, all of the Mediterranean basin had been Christianized by then. I had to cut the legend off to make it fit. But the darker areas are where there are higher concentrations of Christians. And the lighter blue is where there's still a lot of Christians, but not, let's say, I think if I remember the legend correctly, the dark blue was where Christians are the majority. And the light blue is where there are substantial minorities, but not the majority. But still, the Roman Empire clearly has been Christianized. I think this map is not exactly entirely right. I don't think all of Scotland and Ireland had been Christianized. Certainly not all of Scotland by 600 AD. But anyway, so of course, there's the capital, Constantinople, the other capital, Rome, which no longer is really a capital after 476. But of course, there's heavier concentrations of Christians in the East. Why? Because Christianity started. And I just realized the other day, I'm moving around my little cursor on the PowerPoint here to say this and this and this. And I realized that it doesn't show up for you guys, does it? Anyway, if you look at the map in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, of course, where does Christianity come from? From the area of what is now Israel. So there are a lot of Christians there. And it spread first to the East, although it had spread substantially to the West. But anyway, there's the point. The environs of... what had been the Roman Empire were Christian because remember the Roman Empire becomes Christian. No, I don't remember. I haven't done that yet, have I? I'm getting your class confused with the other class. Anyway. Yes, in your class I've done this. The Roman Empire becomes, Christianity becomes legal in the Roman Empire under Constantine with the Edict of Milan, and then early 4th century, and then it becomes the official religion of the empire by the late 4th century, 395 or so. But here's the situation 491 years later. Although there are pockets of Christians here where it's green, where it's green, and we can debate about the Iberian Peninsula or what will later be Spain, because although there were a lot of Muslim rulers and a lot of Muslims, the majority of the people were still Christian. But certainly where it's dark green, darker green, Muslims are the majority. And even in areas of what is now Anatolia, what is now Turkey, before it was Turkey. the geographical area known as Anatolia, which was like the key area of the Byzantine Empire. By this time, by the time we get to 1091, there's an awful lot of Muslims there. The Byzantine Empire has sort of been pushed back into the Balkan Peninsula, and it still holds on to a little bit of territory. It holds on to Constantinople, which you should know where that is by now if not look it up. So, you know, what happened in 491 years? Well, well, as Ronald Reagan used to say. You had the Muslim-Arab conquest of Christian-Roman Syria, that is Byzantine Syria, between 634 and 638, which included the taking of Jerusalem away from the Byzantines. There were a couple times where they got it back, but they never got it back permanently. Muslim-Arab and Berber conquest of Christian Egypt and North Africa between 639 and 698. Muslim Arab attacks on Constantinople for about a century. They never took up, but they attacked it pretty much constantly. Muslim Arab and Berber conquest of much of Christian Iberia, that is the peninsula that later would be Spain and Portugal. I've talked some about that. Between 711 and 788, France, the Frankish kingdom was invaded, but the invasion was stopped in 732 by Charles Martel. Okay, now here's something that... The textbook that I used for this course that I haven't assigned because I just distilled everything out of it, you're welcome, saving you $140 or whatever. There's a line in that textbook and I have it somewhere. I don't have it at hand and I don't need to go into it because I need to get these lectures done. But there's a line in that book that says that, that says one of the motivations for the Crusades was the belief that Muslims had been you know, interdicting, which means preventing the travel to, and even destroying Christian shrines in the Holy Land. And then the book says, this is not true. The book is full of two things. Well, one thing mainly that comes out of the back end of a horse or of any animal, for that matter. That statement, this is not true, is just a blatant lie. Because, again, sorry, PhD in Islamic history here, know something about it. There was the Fatimid caliph who ruled Egypt. Remember that map I showed you at the end last time, and I thought I was showing you with the little arrows, but which weren't showing up. The Fatimids ruled Egypt for several hundred years, and they were a sect of Shia Islam, not the 12ers that I went into a long explanation on, but actually another sect called the Seminers. too much detail anyway, they were Shia, and they were pretty belligerent and pretty jihadist, particularly toward other Muslims, particularly Sunnis, but they also, you know, weren't particularly fond of Christians. And one of their caliphs, a guy named al-Hakam, in the year 1009, took an army from Egypt up to the Holy Land, up to what is now Israel and Jerusalem, and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Destroyed it, utterly destroyed it. Now, Sepulchre is a Greek and then Latin word for tomb. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a church in Jerusalem built over what was believed to be the site where Jesus was buried. Been there three times. It's very interesting. A lot of people try to claim it's not that, but archaeologists are almost certain it is the place where Jesus was buried. It stands alone. Okay, so I should probably put a chart up of this. I'm getting into too much detail. But anyway, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was originally built by the Emperor Constantine in his time. You know, he died in what, 337 AD. Again, remember the first Roman Christian emperor, the first Christian Roman emperor to actually have that change policy. There was actually a Christian Roman emperor before him, a guy named Philip, about, I don't know, 50 years earlier. But he pretty much, as near as we could tell, just kept his Christianity to himself and didn't do anything publicly with it. Anyway, sorry, I've got some sort of weird nose thing going on. I'm trying not to sneeze and sniffle, and I apologize. So Constantine built the first church of the Holy Sepulchre. That was what they destroyed. That was what the Caliph of Hacom destroyed, utterly destroyed it. Now it was rebuilt later by the Crusaders. And if you go to Jerusalem, and again I've been three times, if you get a chance to go, it's maybe not now, but it's really wonderful to go. There's a large church there built. and a church is built over the site, which is a smaller building, which is over the site of what, again, many archaeologists believe was the site where Jesus was buried after the crucifixion. So it's simply untrue to say that Christians, excuse me, that Muslims were not doing anything to Christian holy sites, because this is one very prime example. So it did affect people's viewpoints because... Sorry, the German shepherds over there whining about something. There's probably an unauthorized person and or animal in the cul-de-sac, which is not authorized if you're a German shepherd. They need to get their, you know, their passes stamped. The Muslim Seljuk Turks had attacked the Byzantines. Again, I talked about how the Seljuks came in into the Abbasid empire, then they kind of pushed the Abbasids aside and kind of ran the show. The Muslim Seljuk Turks attacked the Byzantines 1040-1071, as I said. Actually, it went on until 1308, but 1071 was the Battle of Manzikert, where the Byzantines got their, you know, what's handed to them, which then made Byzantine territory even more vulnerable to Muslim colonization and such. So, that's the context, all right? When the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I decided to ask for help, he wrote a letter to Pope Urban II in Rome. The question is, why didn't he write a letter to the Holy Roman Emperor, which is, you know, Germany. Some of you are a little confused on this. The Holy Roman Empire was not the Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was the empire, basically, that Constantine put together, although it didn't get that name until about a century later. So it's basically Germany and France. You know, they were trying to claim to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire, but they really weren't. Anyway, so why didn't, but why didn't... the Byzantine emperor who's asking for help against Muslim invasion, why didn't he send it to a secular ruler, the King of France, King of England, or the Holy Roman Emperor? Well, because politically, the Byzantine emperor, who just calls himself the Roman Emperor, and that's what they always call themselves, again, Byzantine is a term historians use, to distinguish the Eastern Roman Empire that survived from the Western Roman Empire that collapsed. But they never called themselves Byzantines. They called themselves Romans until May 15th, 1453, when they were finally wiped out by the Ottomans. So if he were to ask for help, look, you don't ask for help from someone that's weaker than you, right? You ask for help from someone that's at least your equal, if not stronger. If he had written to one of these kings or emperors asking for help, he would have been acknowledging them as his equals. And he's not about to do that, right? I mean, they would laugh, the Holy Roman Emperor up there in Germany, you know, where guys don't know how to eat with a fork and they probably don't bathe very often and, you know, whatever. As opposed to the emperor, there is a Holy Roman Emperor, the Byzantines would have said, and it's the guy sitting in that big, nice palace in Constantinople. It's not some guy in some wood and thatched hut in Aachen. up in Germany, right? That's just the way they looked at it. So he writes the Pope because it had only been a few years. This was in 1095. It's been, what, 40 years since the Great Schism and the Catholic and Orthodox churches had split. So, you know, they had a long history going back a long time. And they had connections with the Bishop of Rome, at least in terms of the church. And so... It's sort of, it's a safer diplomatic bet for Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, to ask for help from the pope. And here's just another map that shows you that, okay, so here's what's left of the Byzantine empire. They do have some outposts over here in Italy and depending on the year they have part of Greece. See they've lost, they used to have all of this, all of the Middle East and much of North Africa used to belong to the Byzantines and now it's belonged to Muslims. So the Byzantines, one of the things that kept them going for as long as it did was that they had a very effective navy. And I've talked some about that before. And here's a lot of land battles, and this is useful because it has the outlines of the modern country, Iraq, the modern countries, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Turkey. But, you know, the Byzantines were up here, but they fought a lot of battles. I mean, again, the Byzantines never invaded Arabia, all right? The Byzantines played defense the whole time. This is where the Crusades come in, okay? You know, we tend to look at the world from the perspective of today, in which for the last, you know, 500 years of human history, the West, the European countries, and then the United States have been the dominant military powers. You know, it was Europeans that colonized other places. I mean, the Aztecs didn't sail over and colonize France or Spain, which is quite a horrible thought because then we might all be practicing, you know, human sacrifice and didn't work out that way. So the perspective we have today is that, you know, the West, particularly Christians, have always been, you know, On the offense, been offensive in more than one way. They've been the colonizers. They've been the people that win. But that's the last 500 years. We're going back 1,000 years. And the 500 years before that, it was the other way around. Europeans would continually be invaded. I've talked about it, right? The Byzantines had lost half their territory. Christian Iberia, what is now Spain and Portugal, was conquered by Muslims. They had tried to conquer France. They failed, but they tried. So, you have to go back and look at the way the world looks in a thousand or so AD, because this is just a little bit later. This is the 1090s, you know, 90, 100 years later. From their perspective, they were the ones being invaded. They were the ones being threatened. They were the ones being attacked. And so, the Byzantines are fighting back. They're not invading Arabia and attacking Medina or Mecca, you know. And, you know, the Western Christians aren't invading. Initially, at least, I mean, you know, they're doing the Reconquista in, you know, again, Spain, but that was Christian territory before Muslims invaded. So it's sort of similar here. What happens is, you see all these battles of Byzantines were fought, and some of them they won, some of them they lost. If you look at the legend here. So, you know, it is the Christian world, either the Byzantine world or the Western Christian world, that is under attack. So, when they start, when Alexis asks for help and Western Europeans come as crusaders, their point of view is that, well, this territory here, the Holy Land where Jesus lived and died, and again, if you're Christian, was resurrected, that the Holy Land was Christian for many years. Okay, yeah, it was Jewish before that, but the Jews don't have any major empire at this point where they can enforce their will on anybody. Just kind of keeping their head down here. It's, the perspective again, you know, it was wrong or right, this is the perspective these people had, was that their holy land had been taken away by people that didn't believe as they did, and therefore it needed to be put back into their hands, that is Christian hands. So that's the way they saw it. So again, here it shows you, again, the Byzantine Empire used to be all of this, like, you know, doing the arrow again, and you can't see it, but, you know, Egypt. And then Damascus and all that area through there used to be Christian territory, Byzantine territory. By the time we get to the eve of the Crusades, you know, again, the Byzantines are losing. And these arrows are Muslims attacking into Christian territory. And, you know, a different, and, you know, there are Muslims that fought other Muslims and Christians fought other Christians. I mean, at one point, the Fourth Crusade, it's the Catholics actually fighting against the Orthodox. And the Seljuk Turks here are fighting against the Fatimids. So. It's not always that you would take the side of the religion you're on. Sometimes you fight against your own co-religionists. Muslims do this. Christians do this. You know, everybody does this. But in general, the thrust is, literally and figuratively, to bring down the Byzantine Empire. So the Pope at the time was Urban II, and he got this letter, and he thought, oh, this is great. There are four reasons he thought it was great and he agreed to send help. He couldn't send any help of his own, but he could, you know, as we've talked about, popes have a lot of pull with the rulers of Europe. Again, the first one is payback for centuries of invasion. As I was just saying, the Christian world had been on defense for centuries. And the idea was, no, here's a chance to go on offense. The Pope also thought they could resume control over the Eastern Orthodox. They split in 1054, as I said, the Great Schism. The Orthodox didn't see it that way. The Byzantines didn't see it that way. But that's the way the Pope was looking at it. The Reconquista, which I talked about, you know, again, which was the Christian kingdoms that survived in the northern Iberian Peninsula, Leon, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, fighting back and moving south and retaking Christian territory from Muslims. It took hundreds of years, but it was eventually done. The idea was that if Christian armies can defeat Muslim armies in Iberia, why can't they do it, you know, in the Holy Land? And then there was an over-idea that, as I was getting at before, that the Holy Land belonged to, you know, should have been Christian because Jesus lived and died there. And again, if you're Christian, was resurrected. And that that Holy Land should belong to people that believe that, not to people that don't believe that. So that's motivations. So my circle is cutting off. You're going to have to look at the PowerPoint without that. The bottom one I have here is that the Pope came up with this idea. in which he would promise absolution in regarding war as a penitential act. He gave this at a sermon in Clermont, France in 1095, some weeks after he got the letter from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius. If you don't know, absolution in churches like the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, if you confess your sins and then repent of them, and then the priest... can, in the name of Jesus, grant you absolution, basically forgiveness of your sins. The priest cannot forgive your sins. No priest can forgive your sins in either Catholic or Orthodox thought. And there are some Protestant churches that do it. Lutheran churches do it. Episcopal churches have confession. Again, just evangelicals don't, but evangelicals are a minority of world Christianity. So you could get absolution for your sins if you were to go fight a crusade. That is war, the war of Fighting in the War of Crusade, which literally means War of the Cross, is a penitential act. That is, it penance, again, Catholics do penance, most churches don't, besides the Catholics, but the Catholics are the biggest game in town on the planet. Penance means once you've done, once you've confessed your sins, you still have, there are still things you're supposed to do to prove that you... actually meant it and you're not just mouthing the words and for instance you're told to say a set number of prayers or maybe give money to the poor or maybe do community service or something you know it's kind of like being on parole um so pope urban came up with this idea that uh that that fighting on crusade would take care of your sins both in this life and the next so if you were to die in crusade just fighting on it takes care of your sins but if you were to die on it all of your sins would be forgiven instantly, basically, you'd go to heaven. Now, I have read the Bible a number of times. There are no passages that say this anywhere in the Bible. Apologies to our Catholic friends and to Pope Urban, but it ain't there. So, again, in the Catholic Church, theology does not just come from the Bible. It comes from what leaders of the church have come up with in terms of interpreting the Bible over centuries and millennia. And so, Pope Urban came up with this concept that... If you're planning a crusade, you're good to go. Good to go to heaven. All right, so he preached this, and a bunch of the leaders, particularly of France, started planning crusades. But before they got their stuff together, because this is a long campaign, far away, right? It's not like today. You know, the United States could put Marines or the 101st Airborne, my old unit, on a plane and get them around the world in, you know, six, eight hours. A little more complicated a thousand years ago. You had to make plans. So anyway, these guys are planning. I'll get back to that in a minute. But a bunch of sort of fired up preachers, like a Catholic priest called Peter the Hermit, went out and started giving these riled up speeches. And by the way, the assignment I have for this, one of the assignments for the paper is to watch A clip of a video from a show from, I don't know, 30 years ago now on the BBC about the Crusades. It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it's very well done. So there's a clip that shows you kind of how this worked. So, basically, these were Catholic demagogues like Peter the Hermit, who basically went out and gave speeches, and this is supposed to be like him doing it here, gave sermons, I should say, and got people fired up, just regular people fired up. And there was something called the People's Crusade, where something like 40,000 serfs and lower class people got all fired up with... I mean, Peter the Hermit was also preaching stuff about the end of time. This was not long after the end of the first millennium. And if you don't know, millennia, a thousand years, periods, a thousand year periods are very important in Christian eschatology and to time beliefs because in the book of Revelation, it talks about the thousand year reign of Satan or the letter of Christ the other way around. No, that's the way it is. So anyway, yeah, I guess y'all are too young, but when 2000 was coming around, there were people coming up with all this kind of stuff. I remember this in 1999. So anyway, he exploited a lot of that stuff, managed to get 40,000 people literally walking and riding their donkeys and such, mainly from what is now France, other parts of Europe, but mainly France. And they walked all across Europe down to Constantinople. A lot of them didn't make it, but about 30,000 of them made it. And needless to say, this was not what the Byzantines had in mind. You know, they did not want a bunch of unwashed rabble. I mean, some of them had weapons, but they weren't trained. He didn't want them. He wanted somebody to do what they were doing. But anyway, so they ferried him across the Bosporus, which is Constantinople. I mentioned this sometime back. Constantinople is right on what's called the Bosporus, which is about the 10 mile long, half mile wide channel or straight, S-T-R-A-I-T, that connects the Mediterranean through the Sea of Bosporus to the Black Sea. So, He got ferries and got them across because technically the western side is Europe and the eastern side is Asia. Got them across and they all started marching towards Jerusalem. And the Seljuk Turks showed up and slaughtered them all. So that Peasants Crusade didn't work out. Meanwhile, the real crusaders are getting their you-know-what together. And they had three major motivations stemming from the... Sorry, my son's calling. calling three major motivations stemming from the pope's sermon as to why they should engage in crusade um let's see just telling him on the phone sorry um one was this idea that your sins are all forgiven so there's a lot of christian zeal you know fired up christian thought that you know if we go on crusade our sins will be forgiven so you know maybe we cheated on our maybe we cheated on our wives or we um you know killed somebody who weren't supposed to all that can be forgiven if you fight on crusade adventure look these guys i talked about this briefly i think last week but but you know i talked about the the the medieval manorial system and the fiefdom and vassals and all that stuff, feudalism, right? These guys were the knights that trained all the time because their job was to protect the people that lived on their land. And, you know, some of them did that. Some of them just liked to fight. But they spent a lot of time training. They were professional soldiers as well as rulers, particularly professional soldiers. And, you know, some of y'all play sports. But you can imagine if you just trained all the time and never got to play a game. The way these guys look at it is like, we've been training and training and training, and the church is telling us we're not supposed to kill each other, although eventually Christians do. The French and the English had this little 100 years war thing. But at this period of time, they don't have any enemies to attack at this particular period of time. So the Pope says, here, it's okay to go kill Muslims. So, yeah, it's adventure to do that. And the third part of this is more socioeconomic. In medieval Europe, the... Oh, I've got to get moving. 29 minutes. In medieval Europe, the inheritance system was something called primogenitor, in which the eldest son got everything. So if you were a second or third or fourth son, and your father died, you stood to get... Again, we're talking about... No, we're not talking about serfs here. We're talking about the knights and the nobles and the dukes. the professional soldier soldier in ruling class if you were not a the first born son you stood to get nothing and sometimes you know your your older son could be cool and give you some stuff, maybe give you a castle to live in somewhere down the road and some money, but he didn't have to. But so you got a lot of, you got a lot of second and third and fourth sons that went on crusade to make a name and fortune for themselves and, you know, not have to be dependent on the goodwill of their older brother. So this is the crusade. This is the first through the fourth crusades on this map. The first crusade is, I can't see the bloody thing. It looks like it's the bluish purple one. The second crusade is green. The third crusade is red. The fourth crusade is yellow. There were nine crusades altogether. I'll get to this in a bit. But here we're talking about the first crusade. And so mainly it's from France. There were some guys from the Holy Roman Empire, but mainly it was France. France. It was France. And they would come to either Venice or Genoa, and then mainly Venice. Or come down to this part of Italy and then take ship. Actually, you could stay. You could go by land the whole way. It's a little more tricky. But anyway, those are the routes they took. And again, here's the Seljuk Turks. And this is the crusader states that are created. We'll talk about that in a minute. So I thought this was kind of cool. I don't know if you see these doge dog memes. I think they're funny. Medieval wars in movies. Maybe a few awards in reality. We're just going to sit here for two years, and we'll sit out here for two years and read the room, Jerry. Those things. First Crusade was really the only one that was a success of the nine crusades. That is a success militarily. I'm not morally saying it was a success. I'm saying in terms of its military and political agenda, it succeeded. None of the others did. It was led by These five guys, the overall leader was Godfrey of Bouillon, who was also known for making soups. Baldwin of Boulogne, his brother. Raymond IV of Toulouse. Boeymund of Taranto, who was one of the Normans. I talked about the Normans, some of whom had gone and conquered Sicily and southern Italy. He was from there. And Robert II of Flanders, no relation to Flanders from the Simpsons. Simpsons and Robert III of Normandy, who was the brother of King William II of England, William I. had been the Norman Frenchmen who conquered England. So again, these guys are not kings, they're counts, they're lesser rulers. And so, you know, they're, I've gone over that. All their armies converged, but we're not sure exactly, but it seems to be about 60,000 men, which is a substantial force. Most of them knights, most of them professional knights. And go back to the last lecture, I talked about Normans and what kind of fighting mode they had. converged on Constantinople, then they moved down into Anatolia. They showed up outside of Constantinople, and Alexius was really nervous, because an army of 60,000, even the people that were supposed to be his allies, makes you really nervous, because they could have done some damage to Constantinople, turned out on the Fourth Crusade. Other crusaders did, but we'll get to that. He helped them get across into Anatolia, that is, down into what is Turkey proper. It's not Turkey yet. And as they went south, they head south toward Jerusalem, they defeat Turkish forces on the way down. The Turks, the Seljuk Turks, had never fought heavy cavalry. And the Norman French, mainly the Norman French knights, are heavy cavalry, and they don't really have a way, they can't figure out how to defeat them. And they took, so as they went south, some of them peeled off and created states. I'll show you the map in a second. But eventually about 20,000 crusaders made it to Jerusalem in 1099 and took the city with much slaughter. So here, so you know, they're coming from the north. Okay, this is the Holy Land and then up to the north is Turkey. And if you go on this map, way up off the map to the north and to the west, you'll find Constantinople. But as they went south, guys peeled off. Like for instance, You had Edessa up here. So you have Edessa. Edessa, Baldwin and some of his men, you know, five or six thousand men peeled off and took this territory and created their little kingdom. And then the rest of the craters started heading south. Bohemond and several thousand of his men peeled off and took Antioch. And then they're heading south. And I have to look at these, always forget who did what. I can't see that. It's too dang small. Raymond and some of his men peeled off and took Tripoli. And so it was about 20 or 25,000 men that remained under Godfrey, and they eventually made it down through what is now northern Lebanon and Israel. to Jerusalem in August. It was August, September of 1099. It was August. I think they took the city in September. And then they set up, then they conquered the territory around it so that they created what's called the Kingdom of Jerusalem. So basically, you had four crusader states, Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and then the biggest and most important, although Edessa is pretty big too. But the most important, of course, was Jerusalem, which, by the way, is more or less the territory of modern Israel and then some of modern Jordan going down to the Red Sea. They transplanted European-style feudalism there. It helped make Venice rich because Venice was the main city that provided the naval forces to transport people back and forth. There's an argument that it served as a pressure valve for Europe in the sense that I never really bought this. Most history books will tell you this. I don't know if they've ever proved this. Pressure Val means that, okay, so you take 60,000 heavily armored and testosterone knights out of Europe, and you transplant them to the Middle East, and it does what? It allows a bit of peace in Europe because a lot of guys that otherwise would be spoiling for fights. or else fighting somebody else. Now, I've never seen any data that actually, any socioeconomic data that supports this. This is just a contention, so maybe it's true. I'm not sure I'm buying it though. Also, the Crusaders created a couple of military orders. Military orders are like, you know, we talked about Catholic orders earlier on a previous lectures, like the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Cistercians. I talked about some of them earlier. These were military orders. These were Orders of people like they were monks, but they were warrior monks basically They took vows of poverty chastity obedience and they also took vows depending on which particularly order like like the the Knights Templar took a vow to protect the The whole Church of the Holy Sepulchre which they rebuilt remember I said the Caliph of Hakim destroyed it 1009 so here a century or so later they rebuild it and in fact if you go to Jerusalem now The enormous Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has within it a bunch of smaller churches, and then it has the building called the Etiquette. I should put pictures of this up. I've been to this a couple of times. That again is believed to be the place where Jesus was, Jesus, that was the site of Jesus's tomb. That was rebuilt by the Crusaders while they were there. So you have Knights of Knights of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers. Again, warrior monks who also took a vow of caring for pilgrims. They set up basically hospitals to care for pilgrims. Because people, although it was a long and dangerous journey, people would come from Europe to go on pilgrimage to visit Jerusalem, you know, to see where Jesus was crucified and then resurrected. Teutonic Knights are a bit different. The Teutonic Knights actually were founded a century or so after the Crusades. And they were founded, Teutonic, of course, means German. They were founded way up in... the Holy Roman Empire, and they were founded. They didn't fight in the Holy Land. Teutonic Knights actually, they were modeled, they were the same kind of order as the Knights Templar and such, but they fought way up in what is now like Poland against pagans because Christianity, the last part of Europe to be Christianized was what is now like Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, that area. So it's kind of interesting. So that was the first crusade. It succeeded. Here's some of the later crusades. There were at least, I said nine, it's really actually eight, depending on if we count the Teutonic Crusades. There was a second crusade in 1147, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France. It failed. It tried to expand the territory of the crusades. It didn't work. Now, between the second and third crusade, the crusaders suffered a major setback. A Muslim leader called Saladin, Saladin, but his actual name is Saladin. and he was actually Kurdish, which is another ethnic group, but he's a Sunni Muslim. He had taken over control of Syria and Egypt. So he controlled, he had defeated the Seljuk Turks and carved out a state that basically consisted of modern Egypt and modern Syria. So everything is sort of around the crusaders. And he was quite a good commander. And in 1171, at the Battle of Hattin, he defeated the crusaders. excuse me, at 1171, he put his state together, came to power, I'm sorry, 1187, Battle of Hattin, he took, he defeated the Crusaders and took back Jerusalem. Now, the rest of the Crusader states were still there, but he took back Jerusalem, which of course had sort of been the whole point, right? And the Crusaders never got it back. The Third Crusade was called in order to get Jerusalem back, and it was led by the King of England, Richard I. If you ever see a picture of Parliament, there's a big statue of him outside of the British Parliament, the English Parliament, on horseback. He was a really good warrior. He was not a very good ruler. He and Philip II of France tried to retake Jerusalem. They failed. They fought Salah ad-Din a number of times. Richard actually defeated him in battle at least once, but they couldn't get the city back. The Fourth Crusade was a real F-up, if you will. The Fourth Crusade was called, Pope Innocent III called it the death of Salah ad-Din, thinking they could then finally get Jerusalem back again. Crusaders wound up going over to, in each one of these crusades, you've got new guys coming from Europe. But each one of them really is smaller. Like the first one, we said 60,000 men. Second one, 40,000. Third one, 25,000. Fourth one, 20,000. So they each get smaller as time goes by. I mean, there's still enough forces to do damage to people, but they aren't the first one, which was by far the biggest and, again, the most successful. The Fourth Crusade, a bunch of Catholic knights showed up, and what they would normally do on every crusade is they'd stage over to Constantinople and go south because they were supposed to be helping the Byzantines. Well, the Fourth Crusaders didn't help the Byzantines at all. They got to Constantinople, and there was a civil war going on over who was supposed to be the emperor. And they got involved with this, and they backed one side against another. And basically all they did was help one side of the Byzantine civil war kill some other Byzantines. And then they also took a bunch of stuff from Constantinople back to Europe. A lot of it wound up in Venice. So the Fourth Crusade is very ill-remembered by people in the East because basically... you had Catholics instead of attacking Muslims attacking Orthodox Christians. Fifth Crusade, King Andrew II of Hungary did briefly retake Jerusalem, but he only held it for a couple of months. Then he went down to Egypt and tried to attack Cairo. Didn't succeed. Sixth Crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II took an army. And he, an interesting guy, a very smart guy. He had been raised in Sicily. and is said to have been able to speak Arabic because there were Arabs living in Sicily. He was a diplomat. He was a warrior too, but he was a smooth guy. He managed to talk the Muslim rulers into giving people, because they had banned Christians from Jerusalem, right? Which, you know, I can't say you blame them. I blame them. But he had managed to gain access for pilgrims to Jerusalem via diplomacy for a while. The Seventh Crusade, both the Seventh and the Eighth Crusade were waged, led by King Louis IX of France. In the Seventh Crusade, he tried to conquer Egypt. Now, once you're trying to conquer Egypt, really, you've kind of lost the point of the Crusades, haven't you? I guess you could argue that the Muslim rulers of Egypt, who again by this time were the descendants of Saladin, they'd replaced the Fatimids, that they were a major power. And if you took them out of the picture, it made it easier for the Crusaders to go into the Holy Land. I guess that's what you could look at it strategically. But anyway, he failed a couple of times. So really, the Eighth Crusade is probably the last one. This is 1270. So by this time, we're almost 200 years after the First Crusade. And then you had the Crusades up in Europe, as I was saying, waged mainly by the Teutonic Knights against pagans and also the Cathars. Remember, I talked about the Cathars sometime back being in France. They also showed up in some other parts of Europe. They were a heretical brand of crusades. Christianity that survived. So what eventually happens to the Crusader states is it's kind of it's a little complex. Some of them suffered because the Mongols came through. The Mongols mainly however killed Muslims because there were more Muslims than there were Crusaders. Why is my alarm going off at 12 noon? I have no idea. The Mongols came from Central Asia of course. They took over Baghdad in 1258, killed the last Abbasid Caliph. Supposedly, they rolled him up the carpet, kicked him to death because they didn't want to get blood on the floor, which is rather squeamish for the Mongols because the Mongols were famous for being incredibly brutal and bloody. But anyway, the Mongols came through. The Mongols only ever that we know of lost two battles. They lost to the samurai of Japan when they tried to invade Japan once, and they lost. They lost in the Middle East to the Mamluks of Egypt, who, by the way, interestingly enough, were helped by the Crusaders. When the Mongols first showed up, the Mongols were mainly Buddhist. Well, the Mongols, there were three major religions among the Mongols. One was basically Mongol animism, you know, sort of spirit religion. There was also Buddhism. Some of the Mongols were Buddhist, and some of the Mongols, actually, believe it or not, were Christian. If you remember a while back, I showed you that map of how Christianity had spread all the way across Central Asia to China, even way back in, you know, 1800 AD. Some of the Mongols actually were Christian. Now, they were a different brand of Christian than the Orthodox and the Catholic, but they were still Christian. The Christianers thought they could ally with them against the Muslims, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That didn't work out very well. So, actually, they finally realized that they had more in common with the Muslims. They've been fighting them with the Mongols who showed up. And actually Muslims, Christians fought with the Muslim Mamluks. The Mamluks had taken over Egypt in 1260. And just so you know, Mamluks were slave soldiers. In a lot of Islamic societies like this one and also the Ottomans. German Shepherd, stop it. The Ottomans did this. Stop. Stop. Telling a German shepherd to stop parking is going to work, right? I don't know what's going on. Anyway, the Mamluks had taken over. They were the slave soldiers who took over and created. In fact, the word Mamluk in Arabic means owned. It basically means slave. There's another word for slave, but this is one. Anyway, they and some of the crusaders fought together in 1260. They had actually taken over earlier in Egypt. Anyway. They defeated the Mongols, but the Mongols didn't go very far away. But although the Crusaders helped them, the Mamluks hated them because they saw them as invaders from the West and they were Christian. So the Mamluks made it their mission in life to get rid of what was left of the Crusader states. And between 1260 and 1291, the Mamluks went after the Crusaders. And by that time, the Crusaders were on their last legs anyway. By 1291, there was only one place where the Crusaders were left, the city of Acre, or Acre, which is in modern northern Israel. And they finally took Acre in 1291, and the remaining Crusaders there were a few thousand left, were either enslaved or killed. The legacy of the Crusades. I don't know if you can say pros and cons. I'm just trying to look at it comprehensively. Finn, stop! I'm going to look out my window, excuse me. So I'm upstairs in my study. My dog is looking out the front window toward the cul-de-sac. There is a woman walking a small dog on our cul-de-sac. Again, totally unauthorized, didn't get their visa stamped, didn't ask permission of the German Shepherd that lives here. You should know better. The Crusades did help the Byzantines survive another 350 years by, you know, fighting Muslims. They helped stabilize European kingdoms by siphoning off militant younger knights. That's that pressure valve theory. I should probably put a question mark against that because, again, I'm not sure I buy it. There's also a theory that's exposed Europeans to more advanced culture. But this is part of that really sort of, again, misinformation that Europeans were all living in the Dark Ages and didn't know how to bathe. you know uncrossed their eyes and the muslims were all so much more advanced and there's some indications of many advances in certain muslim societies but also the european christians were not as backward as they're made out to be so there may be some truth to that but i think it's overstated you did start getting long distance trade between europe and the middle east and not just the crusader cameos but between you know although they fought them a lot the crusaders also traded with people around them so The cons probably outweigh the Crusades, at least in popular perception. The Fourth Crusade, in particular, did poison relations between the Catholics and the Orthodox, as I said, because the Fourth Crusade attacked the Orthodox and sacked Constantinople. But the big thing, of course, and we see this today, like in this stuff with Hamas and Israel, and we used to see this with bin Laden, we'd see this with ISIS and al-Baghdadi, who was the head of ISIS. Muslim fundamentalist jihadist guys are always trotting this out, you know. Like, for instance, bin Laden never referred to Americans as Americans, right? We're all crusaders. Now, I don't know about you all. But I have enough guilt in my life without being responsible for what the French did 900 years ago. All right. So I don't mind taking responsibility for something I've done or my country's done maybe. But don't blame me for something that happened 900 years ago. You know what I'm saying? So this, you know, AQ and ISIS and all these groups, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq. These guys are all trotting this out. Bottom line of the Crusades. Who won? Who won the Crusades? Well, the Crusaders aren't there anymore, right? Despite what bin Laden may have said, or despite what Hamas may say, or what the Iranians may say, Crusaders aren't there anymore, right? The Crusades lasted a couple hundred years, and then they were gone. So who won? Were they offensive or defensive? Well, again, you could say that depends on your point of view, but can you really? I mean, is there not any objective truth to this? tempered by what I said to open this lecture. It was the Christian, this was, okay, you could argue this, yes, this is Christians, particularly Western Christians going on the offensive into the Holy Land because they never owned the Holy Land. But on the other hand, you know, which civilization had been attacking which one for 400 years? So the Crusader States are often described as colonies, but generally a colony makes money for its It's, you know, it's motherland, like, you know, the Spanish colonies in the New World, in the South America and Central America. Those made tons of money for Spain, right? When Britain ruled India, Britain made a lot of money off of India. There have been a lot of socioeconomic analyses. Believe it or not, there's a huge field of study of the Crusades. And because these guys kept really good records. And there's a whole lot of data that shows that the Crusades were not colonies that made money. In fact, France spent a lot of money keeping the Crusades afloat by sending money there, by sending supplies there, interestingly enough. So they were treasure-draining outposts, not really colonies. And again, if you read popular media stuff, and you'll see where, you know, the Islamic world supposedly has been mad for 900 years of the Crusades. I don't know. I've been in the Middle East a lot of times, and people are like, what? You know, I'm more worried about whether Bashar al-Assad's going to bomb me or what the Iranians might do than what happened 900 years ago. And then this last is a little more abstruse, and it's getting a little more complex, but it's a little bit of what's called bibliographical or historiographical stuff, I should say. There's a lot of good indications that, you know, after the Mamluks kept kicked out the last crusaders everybody in middle east just kind of forgot about them they had other things i mean they're fighting with each other the mongols are still over there you got other problems um and the ottomans show up and the ottomans start taking over and then the ottomans take out the the byzantines and voila um and then the arabs have to worry about being conquered by the ottomans which they were um so it turns out that in terms of historiography what happened was the Crusades kind of got forgotten in the Middle East. And then when the Enlightenment came along, you know, which was the move towards secularism and away from the church and such, excuse me, that developed in the 18th century in France and of course England and the United States to a certain degree because, you know, like our founders were largely Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson and Ben Franklin and these guys. It became fashionable and a key point of the Crusade, excuse me, of the Enlightenment that you know, that the church, that Christianity is maybe not as good as everybody makes it out to be, if not downright bad, like Voltaire said. And particularly the Catholic Church came in for a lot of criticism because a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers were French, and France was majority Catholic and officially Catholic for a long time. You know, and this all leads into the French Revolution, Napoleon and stuff, which is for another course. But the French Enlightenment thinkers went back and did research on the Crusades and started saying, well, See, the Crusades proves how bad the Church, and particularly the Catholic Church is. And they wrote entire works on this. And a lot of these works got translated into Ottoman Turkish, because the Ottomans ruled the Middle East by then, and into Arabic. And then people in the Middle East started reading these books, at least the intellectuals did. You know, regular people have better stuff to do. But the intellectuals would read these books, and you know, Istanbul, because that's what Constantinople becomes under the Turks, Istanbul, or Damascus, or Cairo. And they go, oh, yeah, hey, yeah, those crusaders were bad. You know, I had not even heard of them before, but man, they really sucked. So here's bin Laden. Remember Osama bin Laden? Osama bin Laden in 1998 put out a fatwa, an Islamic legal decision, which he had no authority to do, but people listened to him because, you know. He was tall and had a big beard and he'd fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. He put this thing out. It says, It says, Statement of the Islamic Front, of the World Islamic Front, because that's what he called his group, actually, the World Islamic Front. Of jihad against the Jews, al-Yahud, wa al-Salebi'in, and the Crusaders. Wa is and, and the Crusaders. And then this is a Dabic magazine, which that ISIS group used to publish, and I used to study this for certain entities in the government. In summer 2015, they published a Dabic magazine, which is named by way, is the name of a small city in northern Syria, where according to Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi will appear. I talked about the Mathe last time. Anyway, ISIS is really into that Mathe stuff. The failed crusade. See, that's the ISIS flag, which is actually just really, it just has the Shahada on it. It says, Allah is the Messenger of Allah, the Shahada, the Islamic statement of faith. But you know what this is? That's St. Peter's Square in the Vatican, you know, the heart of the Catholic Church. So they photoshopped this and actually there's a statue of St. Peter up there. They took that off and put up the ISIS flag. So, wishful thinking. three perspectives on the Crusades we got a Western perspective we got a Western calm perspective and we got the Muslim perspective and that's actually the that's also the article that is linked separately in the for the assignment for the paper for this week so so anyway there huh that was way too long but that was a lot of stuff to cover alright so you got to write your assignment this week on the Crusades so have a jolly good time with that There you go. All right. That's lecture three in module lecture, the final and third lecture in module five on Islamic expansion of the Crusades.

I did some of this. last time with the crusades prelude sending the stage so you kind of understand because the crusades very important they resonate down to this day there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation about them you know the difference misinformation is when you inform someone sort of accidentally of the wrong data or you you give them the wrong information disinformation is when you per you intentionally intend to deceive people by giving out the wrong information. And gee, neither one of those things happens, does it? Look, every historian comes at it from their own perspective. So thus, in a sense, every historian is biased.

There's no such thing as 100% objective data. So, you know, your best bet, like with a lot of things, like with politics, like with whether or not, you know, certain vaccines are okay, whether or not, whatever, what kind of gas to put in your vehicle, what kind of vehicle to die. whatever what school to go to your best bet is to get information from various sources so you can get a balanced view and not just from one you know not just from right-wing sources or left-wing sources you know which which a lot of people in our country do the crusades you know having been in islamic history here for a while and having dealt with the crusades not just academically but excuse me in the body politic in the in the public arena sphere because i you I write articles and books and things like that.

Excuse me. I can tell you that there are very few topics that are as tendentious, that is partisan, that people use for partisan purposes. Excuse me.

I'm sorry. I have the belches for some reason. It only happens when I get online.

I think it's psychosomatic. Very few topics that are as polarizing, I guess you can say, as the Crusades. And there's a lot of misinformation and indeed disinformation about them.

So I try to present a balanced view here, but I try to correct some of the crazy one-sided perspectives that we get. So anyway, I set the stage with some of the prelude stuff last time. Here's a little bit more before we get into the actual crusade.

So the crusades are often presented as, you know, a bunch of bloodthirsty Christians went out and started killing people for no good reason. You know, as if. You know, everybody in the Middle East and particularly the Holy Land was sitting around just sipping tea at the local, tea or coffee, but they drink a lot of tea in certain parts. When, you know, a bunch of really mad Catholics showed up and started cutting off their heads.

Well, the actual background is a little bit more complex than that. So, for instance, here's the Christian world in about 600 AD. So, you know, a hundred.

25 years or so after the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire is still there. But regardless, all of the Mediterranean basin had been Christianized by then. I had to cut the legend off to make it fit.

But the darker areas are where there are higher concentrations of Christians. And the lighter blue is where there's still a lot of Christians, but not, let's say, I think if I remember the legend correctly, the dark blue was where Christians are the majority. And the light blue is where there are substantial minorities, but not the majority.

But still, the Roman Empire clearly has been Christianized. I think this map is not exactly entirely right. I don't think all of Scotland and Ireland had been Christianized. Certainly not all of Scotland by 600 AD.

But anyway, so of course, there's the capital, Constantinople, the other capital, Rome, which no longer is really a capital after 476. But of course, there's heavier concentrations of Christians in the East. Why? Because Christianity started.

And I just realized the other day, I'm moving around my little cursor on the PowerPoint here to say this and this and this. And I realized that it doesn't show up for you guys, does it? Anyway, if you look at the map in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, of course, where does Christianity come from?

From the area of what is now Israel. So there are a lot of Christians there. And it spread first to the East, although it had spread substantially to the West. But anyway, there's the point.

The environs of... what had been the Roman Empire were Christian because remember the Roman Empire becomes Christian. No, I don't remember. I haven't done that yet, have I?

I'm getting your class confused with the other class. Anyway. Yes, in your class I've done this.

The Roman Empire becomes, Christianity becomes legal in the Roman Empire under Constantine with the Edict of Milan, and then early 4th century, and then it becomes the official religion of the empire by the late 4th century, 395 or so. But here's the situation 491 years later. Although there are pockets of Christians here where it's green, where it's green, and we can debate about the Iberian Peninsula or what will later be Spain, because although there were a lot of Muslim rulers and a lot of Muslims, the majority of the people were still Christian.

But certainly where it's dark green, darker green, Muslims are the majority. And even in areas of what is now Anatolia, what is now Turkey, before it was Turkey. the geographical area known as Anatolia, which was like the key area of the Byzantine Empire. By this time, by the time we get to 1091, there's an awful lot of Muslims there. The Byzantine Empire has sort of been pushed back into the Balkan Peninsula, and it still holds on to a little bit of territory.

It holds on to Constantinople, which you should know where that is by now if not look it up. So, you know, what happened in 491 years? Well, well, as Ronald Reagan used to say. You had the Muslim-Arab conquest of Christian-Roman Syria, that is Byzantine Syria, between 634 and 638, which included the taking of Jerusalem away from the Byzantines.

There were a couple times where they got it back, but they never got it back permanently. Muslim-Arab and Berber conquest of Christian Egypt and North Africa between 639 and 698. Muslim Arab attacks on Constantinople for about a century. They never took up, but they attacked it pretty much constantly.

Muslim Arab and Berber conquest of much of Christian Iberia, that is the peninsula that later would be Spain and Portugal. I've talked some about that. Between 711 and 788, France, the Frankish kingdom was invaded, but the invasion was stopped in 732 by Charles Martel. Okay, now here's something that...

The textbook that I used for this course that I haven't assigned because I just distilled everything out of it, you're welcome, saving you $140 or whatever. There's a line in that textbook and I have it somewhere. I don't have it at hand and I don't need to go into it because I need to get these lectures done.

But there's a line in that book that says that, that says one of the motivations for the Crusades was the belief that Muslims had been you know, interdicting, which means preventing the travel to, and even destroying Christian shrines in the Holy Land. And then the book says, this is not true. The book is full of two things.

Well, one thing mainly that comes out of the back end of a horse or of any animal, for that matter. That statement, this is not true, is just a blatant lie. Because, again, sorry, PhD in Islamic history here, know something about it.

There was the Fatimid caliph who ruled Egypt. Remember that map I showed you at the end last time, and I thought I was showing you with the little arrows, but which weren't showing up. The Fatimids ruled Egypt for several hundred years, and they were a sect of Shia Islam, not the 12ers that I went into a long explanation on, but actually another sect called the Seminers.

too much detail anyway, they were Shia, and they were pretty belligerent and pretty jihadist, particularly toward other Muslims, particularly Sunnis, but they also, you know, weren't particularly fond of Christians. And one of their caliphs, a guy named al-Hakam, in the year 1009, took an army from Egypt up to the Holy Land, up to what is now Israel and Jerusalem, and destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Destroyed it, utterly destroyed it. Now, Sepulchre is a Greek and then Latin word for tomb. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a church in Jerusalem built over what was believed to be the site where Jesus was buried.

Been there three times. It's very interesting. A lot of people try to claim it's not that, but archaeologists are almost certain it is the place where Jesus was buried. It stands alone.

Okay, so I should probably put a chart up of this. I'm getting into too much detail. But anyway, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was originally built by the Emperor Constantine in his time. You know, he died in what, 337 AD.

Again, remember the first Roman Christian emperor, the first Christian Roman emperor to actually have that change policy. There was actually a Christian Roman emperor before him, a guy named Philip, about, I don't know, 50 years earlier. But he pretty much, as near as we could tell, just kept his Christianity to himself and didn't do anything publicly with it. Anyway, sorry, I've got some sort of weird nose thing going on. I'm trying not to sneeze and sniffle, and I apologize.

So Constantine built the first church of the Holy Sepulchre. That was what they destroyed. That was what the Caliph of Hacom destroyed, utterly destroyed it.

Now it was rebuilt later by the Crusaders. And if you go to Jerusalem, and again I've been three times, if you get a chance to go, it's maybe not now, but it's really wonderful to go. There's a large church there built.

and a church is built over the site, which is a smaller building, which is over the site of what, again, many archaeologists believe was the site where Jesus was buried after the crucifixion. So it's simply untrue to say that Christians, excuse me, that Muslims were not doing anything to Christian holy sites, because this is one very prime example. So it did affect people's viewpoints because... Sorry, the German shepherds over there whining about something. There's probably an unauthorized person and or animal in the cul-de-sac, which is not authorized if you're a German shepherd.

They need to get their, you know, their passes stamped. The Muslim Seljuk Turks had attacked the Byzantines. Again, I talked about how the Seljuks came in into the Abbasid empire, then they kind of pushed the Abbasids aside and kind of ran the show.

The Muslim Seljuk Turks attacked the Byzantines 1040-1071, as I said. Actually, it went on until 1308, but 1071 was the Battle of Manzikert, where the Byzantines got their, you know, what's handed to them, which then made Byzantine territory even more vulnerable to Muslim colonization and such. So, that's the context, all right? When the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I decided to ask for help, he wrote a letter to Pope Urban II in Rome.

The question is, why didn't he write a letter to the Holy Roman Emperor, which is, you know, Germany. Some of you are a little confused on this. The Holy Roman Empire was not the Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire was the empire, basically, that Constantine put together, although it didn't get that name until about a century later. So it's basically Germany and France. You know, they were trying to claim to be the resurrection of the Roman Empire, but they really weren't. Anyway, so why didn't, but why didn't... the Byzantine emperor who's asking for help against Muslim invasion, why didn't he send it to a secular ruler, the King of France, King of England, or the Holy Roman Emperor?

Well, because politically, the Byzantine emperor, who just calls himself the Roman Emperor, and that's what they always call themselves, again, Byzantine is a term historians use, to distinguish the Eastern Roman Empire that survived from the Western Roman Empire that collapsed. But they never called themselves Byzantines. They called themselves Romans until May 15th, 1453, when they were finally wiped out by the Ottomans. So if he were to ask for help, look, you don't ask for help from someone that's weaker than you, right?

You ask for help from someone that's at least your equal, if not stronger. If he had written to one of these kings or emperors asking for help, he would have been acknowledging them as his equals. And he's not about to do that, right?

I mean, they would laugh, the Holy Roman Emperor up there in Germany, you know, where guys don't know how to eat with a fork and they probably don't bathe very often and, you know, whatever. As opposed to the emperor, there is a Holy Roman Emperor, the Byzantines would have said, and it's the guy sitting in that big, nice palace in Constantinople. It's not some guy in some wood and thatched hut in Aachen. up in Germany, right? That's just the way they looked at it.

So he writes the Pope because it had only been a few years. This was in 1095. It's been, what, 40 years since the Great Schism and the Catholic and Orthodox churches had split. So, you know, they had a long history going back a long time.

And they had connections with the Bishop of Rome, at least in terms of the church. And so... It's sort of, it's a safer diplomatic bet for Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, to ask for help from the pope. And here's just another map that shows you that, okay, so here's what's left of the Byzantine empire. They do have some outposts over here in Italy and depending on the year they have part of Greece.

See they've lost, they used to have all of this, all of the Middle East and much of North Africa used to belong to the Byzantines and now it's belonged to Muslims. So the Byzantines, one of the things that kept them going for as long as it did was that they had a very effective navy. And I've talked some about that before.

And here's a lot of land battles, and this is useful because it has the outlines of the modern country, Iraq, the modern countries, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Turkey. But, you know, the Byzantines were up here, but they fought a lot of battles. I mean, again, the Byzantines never invaded Arabia, all right? The Byzantines played defense the whole time.

This is where the Crusades come in, okay? You know, we tend to look at the world from the perspective of today, in which for the last, you know, 500 years of human history, the West, the European countries, and then the United States have been the dominant military powers. You know, it was Europeans that colonized other places.

I mean, the Aztecs didn't sail over and colonize France or Spain, which is quite a horrible thought because then we might all be practicing, you know, human sacrifice and didn't work out that way. So the perspective we have today is that, you know, the West, particularly Christians, have always been, you know, On the offense, been offensive in more than one way. They've been the colonizers.

They've been the people that win. But that's the last 500 years. We're going back 1,000 years.

And the 500 years before that, it was the other way around. Europeans would continually be invaded. I've talked about it, right?

The Byzantines had lost half their territory. Christian Iberia, what is now Spain and Portugal, was conquered by Muslims. They had tried to conquer France. They failed, but they tried. So, you have to go back and look at the way the world looks in a thousand or so AD, because this is just a little bit later.

This is the 1090s, you know, 90, 100 years later. From their perspective, they were the ones being invaded. They were the ones being threatened. They were the ones being attacked. And so, the Byzantines are fighting back.

They're not invading Arabia and attacking Medina or Mecca, you know. And, you know, the Western Christians aren't invading. Initially, at least, I mean, you know, they're doing the Reconquista in, you know, again, Spain, but that was Christian territory before Muslims invaded. So it's sort of similar here. What happens is, you see all these battles of Byzantines were fought, and some of them they won, some of them they lost.

If you look at the legend here. So, you know, it is the Christian world, either the Byzantine world or the Western Christian world, that is under attack. So, when they start, when Alexis asks for help and Western Europeans come as crusaders, their point of view is that, well, this territory here, the Holy Land where Jesus lived and died, and again, if you're Christian, was resurrected, that the Holy Land was Christian for many years.

Okay, yeah, it was Jewish before that, but the Jews don't have any major empire at this point where they can enforce their will on anybody. Just kind of keeping their head down here. It's, the perspective again, you know, it was wrong or right, this is the perspective these people had, was that their holy land had been taken away by people that didn't believe as they did, and therefore it needed to be put back into their hands, that is Christian hands. So that's the way they saw it. So again, here it shows you, again, the Byzantine Empire used to be all of this, like, you know, doing the arrow again, and you can't see it, but, you know, Egypt.

And then Damascus and all that area through there used to be Christian territory, Byzantine territory. By the time we get to the eve of the Crusades, you know, again, the Byzantines are losing. And these arrows are Muslims attacking into Christian territory.

And, you know, a different, and, you know, there are Muslims that fought other Muslims and Christians fought other Christians. I mean, at one point, the Fourth Crusade, it's the Catholics actually fighting against the Orthodox. And the Seljuk Turks here are fighting against the Fatimids. So.

It's not always that you would take the side of the religion you're on. Sometimes you fight against your own co-religionists. Muslims do this. Christians do this.

You know, everybody does this. But in general, the thrust is, literally and figuratively, to bring down the Byzantine Empire. So the Pope at the time was Urban II, and he got this letter, and he thought, oh, this is great. There are four reasons he thought it was great and he agreed to send help. He couldn't send any help of his own, but he could, you know, as we've talked about, popes have a lot of pull with the rulers of Europe.

Again, the first one is payback for centuries of invasion. As I was just saying, the Christian world had been on defense for centuries. And the idea was, no, here's a chance to go on offense.

The Pope also thought they could resume control over the Eastern Orthodox. They split in 1054, as I said, the Great Schism. The Orthodox didn't see it that way.

The Byzantines didn't see it that way. But that's the way the Pope was looking at it. The Reconquista, which I talked about, you know, again, which was the Christian kingdoms that survived in the northern Iberian Peninsula, Leon, Castile, Aragon, and Navarre, fighting back and moving south and retaking Christian territory from Muslims. It took hundreds of years, but it was eventually done.

The idea was that if Christian armies can defeat Muslim armies in Iberia, why can't they do it, you know, in the Holy Land? And then there was an over-idea that, as I was getting at before, that the Holy Land belonged to, you know, should have been Christian because Jesus lived and died there. And again, if you're Christian, was resurrected. And that that Holy Land should belong to people that believe that, not to people that don't believe that. So that's motivations.

So my circle is cutting off. You're going to have to look at the PowerPoint without that. The bottom one I have here is that the Pope came up with this idea.

in which he would promise absolution in regarding war as a penitential act. He gave this at a sermon in Clermont, France in 1095, some weeks after he got the letter from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius. If you don't know, absolution in churches like the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, if you confess your sins and then repent of them, and then the priest... can, in the name of Jesus, grant you absolution, basically forgiveness of your sins. The priest cannot forgive your sins.

No priest can forgive your sins in either Catholic or Orthodox thought. And there are some Protestant churches that do it. Lutheran churches do it.

Episcopal churches have confession. Again, just evangelicals don't, but evangelicals are a minority of world Christianity. So you could get absolution for your sins if you were to go fight a crusade. That is war, the war of Fighting in the War of Crusade, which literally means War of the Cross, is a penitential act.

That is, it penance, again, Catholics do penance, most churches don't, besides the Catholics, but the Catholics are the biggest game in town on the planet. Penance means once you've done, once you've confessed your sins, you still have, there are still things you're supposed to do to prove that you... actually meant it and you're not just mouthing the words and for instance you're told to say a set number of prayers or maybe give money to the poor or maybe do community service or something you know it's kind of like being on parole um so pope urban came up with this idea that uh that that fighting on crusade would take care of your sins both in this life and the next so if you were to die in crusade just fighting on it takes care of your sins but if you were to die on it all of your sins would be forgiven instantly, basically, you'd go to heaven. Now, I have read the Bible a number of times.

There are no passages that say this anywhere in the Bible. Apologies to our Catholic friends and to Pope Urban, but it ain't there. So, again, in the Catholic Church, theology does not just come from the Bible. It comes from what leaders of the church have come up with in terms of interpreting the Bible over centuries and millennia.

And so, Pope Urban came up with this concept that... If you're planning a crusade, you're good to go. Good to go to heaven.

All right, so he preached this, and a bunch of the leaders, particularly of France, started planning crusades. But before they got their stuff together, because this is a long campaign, far away, right? It's not like today. You know, the United States could put Marines or the 101st Airborne, my old unit, on a plane and get them around the world in, you know, six, eight hours.

A little more complicated a thousand years ago. You had to make plans. So anyway, these guys are planning.

I'll get back to that in a minute. But a bunch of sort of fired up preachers, like a Catholic priest called Peter the Hermit, went out and started giving these riled up speeches. And by the way, the assignment I have for this, one of the assignments for the paper is to watch A clip of a video from a show from, I don't know, 30 years ago now on the BBC about the Crusades.

It's kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it's very well done. So there's a clip that shows you kind of how this worked. So, basically, these were Catholic demagogues like Peter the Hermit, who basically went out and gave speeches, and this is supposed to be like him doing it here, gave sermons, I should say, and got people fired up, just regular people fired up. And there was something called the People's Crusade, where something like 40,000 serfs and lower class people got all fired up with... I mean, Peter the Hermit was also preaching stuff about the end of time.

This was not long after the end of the first millennium. And if you don't know, millennia, a thousand years, periods, a thousand year periods are very important in Christian eschatology and to time beliefs because in the book of Revelation, it talks about the thousand year reign of Satan or the letter of Christ the other way around. No, that's the way it is.

So anyway, yeah, I guess y'all are too young, but when 2000 was coming around, there were people coming up with all this kind of stuff. I remember this in 1999. So anyway, he exploited a lot of that stuff, managed to get 40,000 people literally walking and riding their donkeys and such, mainly from what is now France, other parts of Europe, but mainly France. And they walked all across Europe down to Constantinople. A lot of them didn't make it, but about 30,000 of them made it. And needless to say, this was not what the Byzantines had in mind.

You know, they did not want a bunch of unwashed rabble. I mean, some of them had weapons, but they weren't trained. He didn't want them. He wanted somebody to do what they were doing. But anyway, so they ferried him across the Bosporus, which is Constantinople.

I mentioned this sometime back. Constantinople is right on what's called the Bosporus, which is about the 10 mile long, half mile wide channel or straight, S-T-R-A-I-T, that connects the Mediterranean through the Sea of Bosporus to the Black Sea. So, He got ferries and got them across because technically the western side is Europe and the eastern side is Asia.

Got them across and they all started marching towards Jerusalem. And the Seljuk Turks showed up and slaughtered them all. So that Peasants Crusade didn't work out. Meanwhile, the real crusaders are getting their you-know-what together. And they had three major motivations stemming from the...

Sorry, my son's calling. calling three major motivations stemming from the pope's sermon as to why they should engage in crusade um let's see just telling him on the phone sorry um one was this idea that your sins are all forgiven so there's a lot of christian zeal you know fired up christian thought that you know if we go on crusade our sins will be forgiven so you know maybe we cheated on our maybe we cheated on our wives or we um you know killed somebody who weren't supposed to all that can be forgiven if you fight on crusade adventure look these guys i talked about this briefly i think last week but but you know i talked about the the the medieval manorial system and the fiefdom and vassals and all that stuff, feudalism, right? These guys were the knights that trained all the time because their job was to protect the people that lived on their land. And, you know, some of them did that.

Some of them just liked to fight. But they spent a lot of time training. They were professional soldiers as well as rulers, particularly professional soldiers. And, you know, some of y'all play sports. But you can imagine if you just trained all the time and never got to play a game.

The way these guys look at it is like, we've been training and training and training, and the church is telling us we're not supposed to kill each other, although eventually Christians do. The French and the English had this little 100 years war thing. But at this period of time, they don't have any enemies to attack at this particular period of time.

So the Pope says, here, it's okay to go kill Muslims. So, yeah, it's adventure to do that. And the third part of this is more socioeconomic.

In medieval Europe, the... Oh, I've got to get moving. 29 minutes. In medieval Europe, the inheritance system was something called primogenitor, in which the eldest son got everything.

So if you were a second or third or fourth son, and your father died, you stood to get... Again, we're talking about... No, we're not talking about serfs here. We're talking about the knights and the nobles and the dukes. the professional soldier soldier in ruling class if you were not a the first born son you stood to get nothing and sometimes you know your your older son could be cool and give you some stuff, maybe give you a castle to live in somewhere down the road and some money, but he didn't have to.

But so you got a lot of, you got a lot of second and third and fourth sons that went on crusade to make a name and fortune for themselves and, you know, not have to be dependent on the goodwill of their older brother. So this is the crusade. This is the first through the fourth crusades on this map. The first crusade is, I can't see the bloody thing.

It looks like it's the bluish purple one. The second crusade is green. The third crusade is red.

The fourth crusade is yellow. There were nine crusades altogether. I'll get to this in a bit. But here we're talking about the first crusade. And so mainly it's from France.

There were some guys from the Holy Roman Empire, but mainly it was France. France. It was France. And they would come to either Venice or Genoa, and then mainly Venice.

Or come down to this part of Italy and then take ship. Actually, you could stay. You could go by land the whole way. It's a little more tricky.

But anyway, those are the routes they took. And again, here's the Seljuk Turks. And this is the crusader states that are created. We'll talk about that in a minute.

So I thought this was kind of cool. I don't know if you see these doge dog memes. I think they're funny. Medieval wars in movies. Maybe a few awards in reality.

We're just going to sit here for two years, and we'll sit out here for two years and read the room, Jerry. Those things. First Crusade was really the only one that was a success of the nine crusades.

That is a success militarily. I'm not morally saying it was a success. I'm saying in terms of its military and political agenda, it succeeded.

None of the others did. It was led by These five guys, the overall leader was Godfrey of Bouillon, who was also known for making soups. Baldwin of Boulogne, his brother.

Raymond IV of Toulouse. Boeymund of Taranto, who was one of the Normans. I talked about the Normans, some of whom had gone and conquered Sicily and southern Italy.

He was from there. And Robert II of Flanders, no relation to Flanders from the Simpsons. Simpsons and Robert III of Normandy, who was the brother of King William II of England, William I. had been the Norman Frenchmen who conquered England. So again, these guys are not kings, they're counts, they're lesser rulers.

And so, you know, they're, I've gone over that. All their armies converged, but we're not sure exactly, but it seems to be about 60,000 men, which is a substantial force. Most of them knights, most of them professional knights. And go back to the last lecture, I talked about Normans and what kind of fighting mode they had. converged on Constantinople, then they moved down into Anatolia.

They showed up outside of Constantinople, and Alexius was really nervous, because an army of 60,000, even the people that were supposed to be his allies, makes you really nervous, because they could have done some damage to Constantinople, turned out on the Fourth Crusade. Other crusaders did, but we'll get to that. He helped them get across into Anatolia, that is, down into what is Turkey proper.

It's not Turkey yet. And as they went south, they head south toward Jerusalem, they defeat Turkish forces on the way down. The Turks, the Seljuk Turks, had never fought heavy cavalry. And the Norman French, mainly the Norman French knights, are heavy cavalry, and they don't really have a way, they can't figure out how to defeat them. And they took, so as they went south, some of them peeled off and created states.

I'll show you the map in a second. But eventually about 20,000 crusaders made it to Jerusalem in 1099 and took the city with much slaughter. So here, so you know, they're coming from the north. Okay, this is the Holy Land and then up to the north is Turkey. And if you go on this map, way up off the map to the north and to the west, you'll find Constantinople.

But as they went south, guys peeled off. Like for instance, You had Edessa up here. So you have Edessa.

Edessa, Baldwin and some of his men, you know, five or six thousand men peeled off and took this territory and created their little kingdom. And then the rest of the craters started heading south. Bohemond and several thousand of his men peeled off and took Antioch.

And then they're heading south. And I have to look at these, always forget who did what. I can't see that. It's too dang small. Raymond and some of his men peeled off and took Tripoli.

And so it was about 20 or 25,000 men that remained under Godfrey, and they eventually made it down through what is now northern Lebanon and Israel. to Jerusalem in August. It was August, September of 1099. It was August. I think they took the city in September. And then they set up, then they conquered the territory around it so that they created what's called the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

So basically, you had four crusader states, Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and then the biggest and most important, although Edessa is pretty big too. But the most important, of course, was Jerusalem, which, by the way, is more or less the territory of modern Israel and then some of modern Jordan going down to the Red Sea. They transplanted European-style feudalism there.

It helped make Venice rich because Venice was the main city that provided the naval forces to transport people back and forth. There's an argument that it served as a pressure valve for Europe in the sense that I never really bought this. Most history books will tell you this. I don't know if they've ever proved this. Pressure Val means that, okay, so you take 60,000 heavily armored and testosterone knights out of Europe, and you transplant them to the Middle East, and it does what?

It allows a bit of peace in Europe because a lot of guys that otherwise would be spoiling for fights. or else fighting somebody else. Now, I've never seen any data that actually, any socioeconomic data that supports this. This is just a contention, so maybe it's true. I'm not sure I'm buying it though.

Also, the Crusaders created a couple of military orders. Military orders are like, you know, we talked about Catholic orders earlier on a previous lectures, like the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Cistercians. I talked about some of them earlier.

These were military orders. These were Orders of people like they were monks, but they were warrior monks basically They took vows of poverty chastity obedience and they also took vows depending on which particularly order like like the the Knights Templar took a vow to protect the The whole Church of the Holy Sepulchre which they rebuilt remember I said the Caliph of Hakim destroyed it 1009 so here a century or so later they rebuild it and in fact if you go to Jerusalem now The enormous Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has within it a bunch of smaller churches, and then it has the building called the Etiquette. I should put pictures of this up.

I've been to this a couple of times. That again is believed to be the place where Jesus was, Jesus, that was the site of Jesus's tomb. That was rebuilt by the Crusaders while they were there.

So you have Knights of Knights of St. John, also known as the Hospitallers. Again, warrior monks who also took a vow of caring for pilgrims. They set up basically hospitals to care for pilgrims. Because people, although it was a long and dangerous journey, people would come from Europe to go on pilgrimage to visit Jerusalem, you know, to see where Jesus was crucified and then resurrected.

Teutonic Knights are a bit different. The Teutonic Knights actually were founded a century or so after the Crusades. And they were founded, Teutonic, of course, means German.

They were founded way up in... the Holy Roman Empire, and they were founded. They didn't fight in the Holy Land. Teutonic Knights actually, they were modeled, they were the same kind of order as the Knights Templar and such, but they fought way up in what is now like Poland against pagans because Christianity, the last part of Europe to be Christianized was what is now like Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Finland, that area. So it's kind of interesting.

So that was the first crusade. It succeeded. Here's some of the later crusades.

There were at least, I said nine, it's really actually eight, depending on if we count the Teutonic Crusades. There was a second crusade in 1147, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France. It failed. It tried to expand the territory of the crusades. It didn't work.

Now, between the second and third crusade, the crusaders suffered a major setback. A Muslim leader called Saladin, Saladin, but his actual name is Saladin. and he was actually Kurdish, which is another ethnic group, but he's a Sunni Muslim. He had taken over control of Syria and Egypt.

So he controlled, he had defeated the Seljuk Turks and carved out a state that basically consisted of modern Egypt and modern Syria. So everything is sort of around the crusaders. And he was quite a good commander. And in 1171, at the Battle of Hattin, he defeated the crusaders. excuse me, at 1171, he put his state together, came to power, I'm sorry, 1187, Battle of Hattin, he took, he defeated the Crusaders and took back Jerusalem.

Now, the rest of the Crusader states were still there, but he took back Jerusalem, which of course had sort of been the whole point, right? And the Crusaders never got it back. The Third Crusade was called in order to get Jerusalem back, and it was led by the King of England, Richard I. If you ever see a picture of Parliament, there's a big statue of him outside of the British Parliament, the English Parliament, on horseback.

He was a really good warrior. He was not a very good ruler. He and Philip II of France tried to retake Jerusalem.

They failed. They fought Salah ad-Din a number of times. Richard actually defeated him in battle at least once, but they couldn't get the city back. The Fourth Crusade was a real F-up, if you will. The Fourth Crusade was called, Pope Innocent III called it the death of Salah ad-Din, thinking they could then finally get Jerusalem back again.

Crusaders wound up going over to, in each one of these crusades, you've got new guys coming from Europe. But each one of them really is smaller. Like the first one, we said 60,000 men. Second one, 40,000.

Third one, 25,000. Fourth one, 20,000. So they each get smaller as time goes by.

I mean, there's still enough forces to do damage to people, but they aren't the first one, which was by far the biggest and, again, the most successful. The Fourth Crusade, a bunch of Catholic knights showed up, and what they would normally do on every crusade is they'd stage over to Constantinople and go south because they were supposed to be helping the Byzantines. Well, the Fourth Crusaders didn't help the Byzantines at all.

They got to Constantinople, and there was a civil war going on over who was supposed to be the emperor. And they got involved with this, and they backed one side against another. And basically all they did was help one side of the Byzantine civil war kill some other Byzantines.

And then they also took a bunch of stuff from Constantinople back to Europe. A lot of it wound up in Venice. So the Fourth Crusade is very ill-remembered by people in the East because basically...

you had Catholics instead of attacking Muslims attacking Orthodox Christians. Fifth Crusade, King Andrew II of Hungary did briefly retake Jerusalem, but he only held it for a couple of months. Then he went down to Egypt and tried to attack Cairo.

Didn't succeed. Sixth Crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II took an army. And he, an interesting guy, a very smart guy. He had been raised in Sicily.

and is said to have been able to speak Arabic because there were Arabs living in Sicily. He was a diplomat. He was a warrior too, but he was a smooth guy.

He managed to talk the Muslim rulers into giving people, because they had banned Christians from Jerusalem, right? Which, you know, I can't say you blame them. I blame them.

But he had managed to gain access for pilgrims to Jerusalem via diplomacy for a while. The Seventh Crusade, both the Seventh and the Eighth Crusade were waged, led by King Louis IX of France. In the Seventh Crusade, he tried to conquer Egypt. Now, once you're trying to conquer Egypt, really, you've kind of lost the point of the Crusades, haven't you?

I guess you could argue that the Muslim rulers of Egypt, who again by this time were the descendants of Saladin, they'd replaced the Fatimids, that they were a major power. And if you took them out of the picture, it made it easier for the Crusaders to go into the Holy Land. I guess that's what you could look at it strategically.

But anyway, he failed a couple of times. So really, the Eighth Crusade is probably the last one. This is 1270. So by this time, we're almost 200 years after the First Crusade.

And then you had the Crusades up in Europe, as I was saying, waged mainly by the Teutonic Knights against pagans and also the Cathars. Remember, I talked about the Cathars sometime back being in France. They also showed up in some other parts of Europe. They were a heretical brand of crusades. Christianity that survived.

So what eventually happens to the Crusader states is it's kind of it's a little complex. Some of them suffered because the Mongols came through. The Mongols mainly however killed Muslims because there were more Muslims than there were Crusaders. Why is my alarm going off at 12 noon? I have no idea.

The Mongols came from Central Asia of course. They took over Baghdad in 1258, killed the last Abbasid Caliph. Supposedly, they rolled him up the carpet, kicked him to death because they didn't want to get blood on the floor, which is rather squeamish for the Mongols because the Mongols were famous for being incredibly brutal and bloody.

But anyway, the Mongols came through. The Mongols only ever that we know of lost two battles. They lost to the samurai of Japan when they tried to invade Japan once, and they lost.

They lost in the Middle East to the Mamluks of Egypt, who, by the way, interestingly enough, were helped by the Crusaders. When the Mongols first showed up, the Mongols were mainly Buddhist. Well, the Mongols, there were three major religions among the Mongols. One was basically Mongol animism, you know, sort of spirit religion.

There was also Buddhism. Some of the Mongols were Buddhist, and some of the Mongols, actually, believe it or not, were Christian. If you remember a while back, I showed you that map of how Christianity had spread all the way across Central Asia to China, even way back in, you know, 1800 AD. Some of the Mongols actually were Christian. Now, they were a different brand of Christian than the Orthodox and the Catholic, but they were still Christian.

The Christianers thought they could ally with them against the Muslims, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That didn't work out very well. So, actually, they finally realized that they had more in common with the Muslims. They've been fighting them with the Mongols who showed up. And actually Muslims, Christians fought with the Muslim Mamluks.

The Mamluks had taken over Egypt in 1260. And just so you know, Mamluks were slave soldiers. In a lot of Islamic societies like this one and also the Ottomans. German Shepherd, stop it. The Ottomans did this.

Stop. Stop. Telling a German shepherd to stop parking is going to work, right?

I don't know what's going on. Anyway, the Mamluks had taken over. They were the slave soldiers who took over and created.

In fact, the word Mamluk in Arabic means owned. It basically means slave. There's another word for slave, but this is one.

Anyway, they and some of the crusaders fought together in 1260. They had actually taken over earlier in Egypt. Anyway. They defeated the Mongols, but the Mongols didn't go very far away. But although the Crusaders helped them, the Mamluks hated them because they saw them as invaders from the West and they were Christian. So the Mamluks made it their mission in life to get rid of what was left of the Crusader states.

And between 1260 and 1291, the Mamluks went after the Crusaders. And by that time, the Crusaders were on their last legs anyway. By 1291, there was only one place where the Crusaders were left, the city of Acre, or Acre, which is in modern northern Israel. And they finally took Acre in 1291, and the remaining Crusaders there were a few thousand left, were either enslaved or killed.

The legacy of the Crusades. I don't know if you can say pros and cons. I'm just trying to look at it comprehensively.

Finn, stop! I'm going to look out my window, excuse me. So I'm upstairs in my study. My dog is looking out the front window toward the cul-de-sac.

There is a woman walking a small dog on our cul-de-sac. Again, totally unauthorized, didn't get their visa stamped, didn't ask permission of the German Shepherd that lives here. You should know better. The Crusades did help the Byzantines survive another 350 years by, you know, fighting Muslims. They helped stabilize European kingdoms by siphoning off militant younger knights.

That's that pressure valve theory. I should probably put a question mark against that because, again, I'm not sure I buy it. There's also a theory that's exposed Europeans to more advanced culture.

But this is part of that really sort of, again, misinformation that Europeans were all living in the Dark Ages and didn't know how to bathe. you know uncrossed their eyes and the muslims were all so much more advanced and there's some indications of many advances in certain muslim societies but also the european christians were not as backward as they're made out to be so there may be some truth to that but i think it's overstated you did start getting long distance trade between europe and the middle east and not just the crusader cameos but between you know although they fought them a lot the crusaders also traded with people around them so The cons probably outweigh the Crusades, at least in popular perception. The Fourth Crusade, in particular, did poison relations between the Catholics and the Orthodox, as I said, because the Fourth Crusade attacked the Orthodox and sacked Constantinople.

But the big thing, of course, and we see this today, like in this stuff with Hamas and Israel, and we used to see this with bin Laden, we'd see this with ISIS and al-Baghdadi, who was the head of ISIS. Muslim fundamentalist jihadist guys are always trotting this out, you know. Like, for instance, bin Laden never referred to Americans as Americans, right? We're all crusaders. Now, I don't know about you all.

But I have enough guilt in my life without being responsible for what the French did 900 years ago. All right. So I don't mind taking responsibility for something I've done or my country's done maybe.

But don't blame me for something that happened 900 years ago. You know what I'm saying? So this, you know, AQ and ISIS and all these groups, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq.

These guys are all trotting this out. Bottom line of the Crusades. Who won?

Who won the Crusades? Well, the Crusaders aren't there anymore, right? Despite what bin Laden may have said, or despite what Hamas may say, or what the Iranians may say, Crusaders aren't there anymore, right? The Crusades lasted a couple hundred years, and then they were gone.

So who won? Were they offensive or defensive? Well, again, you could say that depends on your point of view, but can you really?

I mean, is there not any objective truth to this? tempered by what I said to open this lecture. It was the Christian, this was, okay, you could argue this, yes, this is Christians, particularly Western Christians going on the offensive into the Holy Land because they never owned the Holy Land. But on the other hand, you know, which civilization had been attacking which one for 400 years? So the Crusader States are often described as colonies, but generally a colony makes money for its It's, you know, it's motherland, like, you know, the Spanish colonies in the New World, in the South America and Central America.

Those made tons of money for Spain, right? When Britain ruled India, Britain made a lot of money off of India. There have been a lot of socioeconomic analyses.

Believe it or not, there's a huge field of study of the Crusades. And because these guys kept really good records. And there's a whole lot of data that shows that the Crusades were not colonies that made money. In fact, France spent a lot of money keeping the Crusades afloat by sending money there, by sending supplies there, interestingly enough. So they were treasure-draining outposts, not really colonies.

And again, if you read popular media stuff, and you'll see where, you know, the Islamic world supposedly has been mad for 900 years of the Crusades. I don't know. I've been in the Middle East a lot of times, and people are like, what? You know, I'm more worried about whether Bashar al-Assad's going to bomb me or what the Iranians might do than what happened 900 years ago.

And then this last is a little more abstruse, and it's getting a little more complex, but it's a little bit of what's called bibliographical or historiographical stuff, I should say. There's a lot of good indications that, you know, after the Mamluks kept kicked out the last crusaders everybody in middle east just kind of forgot about them they had other things i mean they're fighting with each other the mongols are still over there you got other problems um and the ottomans show up and the ottomans start taking over and then the ottomans take out the the byzantines and voila um and then the arabs have to worry about being conquered by the ottomans which they were um so it turns out that in terms of historiography what happened was the Crusades kind of got forgotten in the Middle East. And then when the Enlightenment came along, you know, which was the move towards secularism and away from the church and such, excuse me, that developed in the 18th century in France and of course England and the United States to a certain degree because, you know, like our founders were largely Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson and Ben Franklin and these guys. It became fashionable and a key point of the Crusade, excuse me, of the Enlightenment that you know, that the church, that Christianity is maybe not as good as everybody makes it out to be, if not downright bad, like Voltaire said. And particularly the Catholic Church came in for a lot of criticism because a lot of the Enlightenment thinkers were French, and France was majority Catholic and officially Catholic for a long time.

You know, and this all leads into the French Revolution, Napoleon and stuff, which is for another course. But the French Enlightenment thinkers went back and did research on the Crusades and started saying, well, See, the Crusades proves how bad the Church, and particularly the Catholic Church is. And they wrote entire works on this.

And a lot of these works got translated into Ottoman Turkish, because the Ottomans ruled the Middle East by then, and into Arabic. And then people in the Middle East started reading these books, at least the intellectuals did. You know, regular people have better stuff to do. But the intellectuals would read these books, and you know, Istanbul, because that's what Constantinople becomes under the Turks, Istanbul, or Damascus, or Cairo. And they go, oh, yeah, hey, yeah, those crusaders were bad.

You know, I had not even heard of them before, but man, they really sucked. So here's bin Laden. Remember Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Laden in 1998 put out a fatwa, an Islamic legal decision, which he had no authority to do, but people listened to him because, you know. He was tall and had a big beard and he'd fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. He put this thing out. It says, It says, Statement of the Islamic Front, of the World Islamic Front, because that's what he called his group, actually, the World Islamic Front.

Of jihad against the Jews, al-Yahud, wa al-Salebi'in, and the Crusaders. Wa is and, and the Crusaders. And then this is a Dabic magazine, which that ISIS group used to publish, and I used to study this for certain entities in the government. In summer 2015, they published a Dabic magazine, which is named by way, is the name of a small city in northern Syria, where according to Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi will appear.

I talked about the Mathe last time. Anyway, ISIS is really into that Mathe stuff. The failed crusade. See, that's the ISIS flag, which is actually just really, it just has the Shahada on it.

It says, Allah is the Messenger of Allah, the Shahada, the Islamic statement of faith. But you know what this is? That's St. Peter's Square in the Vatican, you know, the heart of the Catholic Church. So they photoshopped this and actually there's a statue of St. Peter up there. They took that off and put up the ISIS flag.

So, wishful thinking. three perspectives on the Crusades we got a Western perspective we got a Western calm perspective and we got the Muslim perspective and that's actually the that's also the article that is linked separately in the for the assignment for the paper for this week so so anyway there huh that was way too long but that was a lot of stuff to cover alright so you got to write your assignment this week on the Crusades so have a jolly good time with that There you go. All right. That's lecture three in module lecture, the final and third lecture in module five on Islamic expansion of the Crusades.

Transcript for:Understanding the Crusades and Their Impact

Transcript for:
Understanding the Crusades and Their Impact