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Thomas Small
The Crusades what if they were not the medieval Middle East's main event? Long before Frankish armies reached the Levant, Seljuk Turks had swept out of Central Asia, shattering older imperial structures and plunging the region into a new age of conquest, migration and political fragmentation. And in the chaos, a new world order began to be born. Nicholas Morton is a historian and the author of the Crusader A Global History of the wars for the Middle East. He begins the story not with Pope urban II in 1095, but at the Battle of Dandankh 55 years earlier, when mounted archers from the steppe began reshaping the Muslim world. Jerusalem was caught in the firing line and Christian Franks invaded in force. Christian knights who preached the love of enemies while practicing holy war. In a world where Franks and Turks were enemies one day and allies the next, Nicholas shows that the Crusades become intelligible only when they are cut down to their proper size. I'm Thomas Small. This is my Conflicted Conversation with Nicholas Morton. Hello, Nicholas. Welcome to Conflicted. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Thomas.
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Nicholas Morton
It's great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
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Thomas Small
Nicholas, your new book, the Crusader A Global History of the wars for the Middle east, is a triumph. In a really concise 330 pages or so, you tell the whole story of the Crusades from their emergence during the sort of ferment or chaos of the Middle east in the 10th century, all the way to Saladin's reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187. And you do so by doing something that makes your book perfect for our conflicted audience, which is you place Middle Eastern geopolitics at the center of the story of the Crusades, which for me cracked open the whole story and made it much more, on the one hand, more understandable, on the other hand, harder in a way to understand, because the conventional, simplified binaries that we often see the Crusades through are smashed to bits. They no longer work. It's a totally complex story. You've told it with aplomb, with great concision, but it is complicated and therefore I'm thinking, how are we going to do it justice? We're not, dear listeners, going to do it justice. You're going to have to buy the book and read it yourselves today, Nicholas. I think we're going to have to stick to more or less broad level topics, and we're gonna let the readers read the blow by blow account that you so meticulously construct of those incredible events, the Crusades.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah, that strikes very much at the heart of what I'm trying to do here. The Crusades are often told from a Western European perspective, as sort of part of European history. They're sometimes told from an Islamic perspective, they're sometimes told from a Byzantine perspective. But actually, one thing that they almost always have in common is they place the Crusades at the center of the Middle East's. And it's just not what I got from the primary sources. I mean, I've been looking at these documents and other sources for about 20 years, and the Crusades aren't the biggest show in town. There's a lot of other things going on. Even when we talk about, let's say, the Christian perspective on the Crusades, what are we talking about? The Western European perspective, and within that, the Italian, German, French? Or are we talking about the local Christian perspective? Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Byzantine? Or indeed we talk about the Muslim perspectives on. On the Crusades, are we talking about the Kurdish, the Arab, the Seljuk, the Fatimid? There's a whole range of different perspectives under these sorts of broad umbrella communities. So I wanted to draw out the fact there's a lot of different players at the table. And the Crusades are really just one of the various things that are taking place across the region at this time.
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Thomas Small
Absolutely. And once you do that, once the reader benefits from that, reframing the Crusades make more sense. They actually become less apocalyptic, legendary in a way, I guess, less adventurous. And they just seem like a perfectly intelligible part of a larger geostrategic, geopolitical reality in which the Levant is, as you say, a little bit. Not a sideshow. Exactly, but it's at the margins of the larger regional story, which you tell so well. You make it clear that the First Crusade was not in any way an invasion by Christians of a united Muslim world. Not at all. The Crusades were only a component of a much larger regional upheaval. And that's the thing you establish at the outset. The whole of Islam, Dom, at that time was very, very fragmented and in a state of civilizational civil war. As a New arrival on the scene of Middle Eastern geopolitics comes around the Seljuks.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah. I mean, the Crusades were without doubt a war of conquest, but they're taking place in a region where there are many wars of conquest taking place. And it's the drawing together of those various different conquerors that I wanted to focus on. There is something much bigger going on in the background, because I don't know about you, Thomas, but I've never run down the street shouting, the nomads are coming. Have you?
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Thomas Small
Never? Well, I should say not yet, no.
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Nicholas Morton
Okay. But certainly pre1600 in Eurasia, that would be quite a common thing to do because the threat of nomadic invasion is always there. And just conjuring up a map of Eurasia, you have the huge grass sea of central Eurasia, where there are various nomadic peoples, and for the most part, they live very peacefully, moving their flocks and herds from winter to summer, grazing until they don't. And they form a confederation and attack one of the big agricultural civilizations around their margins. Whether that's China, which is why they have the Great Wall of China, whether that's Western Europe, we might think there as the Huns and their wars of the sort of the fifth century, or whether that's the Middle East. And so directly before the First Crusade, you have one such mass movement and conquest taking place out of Central Asia into the Middle East. These are the conquests of the Seljuk Turks. This is not a process that's well known in Western Europe or indeed in many circles today. But the Seljuk invasions fundamentally reshape the Middle east, and they take place only a few decades before the Crusaders arrive themselves.
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Thomas Small
You start your story with the battle of Dandankhaan. I don't know if that's how it's pronounced. Dandankhaan.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah.
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Thomas Small
This was a battle that took place in 1040, so 55 years before the traditional sort of starting gun of The Crusades, in 1095, when Pope Urban II at Clermont calls for a crusade to liberate the Holy Holy Land from the infidel. But in 1040, 55 years earlier, at this Battle of Dandankhon, the Seljuk Turks achieve a victory over the Ghaznavids, which opens the door, as it were, to this invasion of very competent mounted warriors from the steppe, Turkic warriors from the steppe to flood decade after decade, into Iran and into Syria, Iraq, Anatolia. And it kind of smashed up what had been a more or less not unified exactly, but a Kind of urban based, institutionalized world that was upset by the arrival of these nomads. One thing I want to ask though, the Ghaznavids themselves, whom the Seljuks defeated, were Turkic.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah.
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Thomas Small
So I don't want the listener to get the idea that when the Seljuks arrived on the scene, this is the first time that Turkish Turkic warriors arrived on the scenes. Because already, for a couple of hundred years or more, the phenomenon of Turkic Mamluk, you know, Turkic slave soldiers usurping power across the Islamic world was already well and truly done. But what, if I'm not mistaken, what the Seljuks represent is something new. It's not just like Turkic mercenaries that the various sultanates had invited in to help them fight their wars and then they kind of took over. This is new. This is like a more mass invasion of nomads working kind of together in a tribal way, flooding the space between cities across that zone. Is that right?
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah. So there seems to be a large population movement at work here. And certainly you're right, the Ghaznavids who were there before the Seljuks arrived, or at least in sort of Persia, modern day Iran, that sort of region, they were themselves originally from a Turkish background, but they had very much acculturated to sort of the Persian culture in the meantime. But there is a sense in which this is presented as something new. And I think a lot of particularly Turkmen nomadic families are part of this movement, and they come to fundamentally reshape the better grazing in places like sort of northern Persia, Azerbaijan, southern Anatolia, those sorts of areas. It very much changes the demographies of the underlying population as well as the political structures of the region. So this really does move the needle in terms of the balance of power in the Middle East. It also places the Crusades in perspective because the first Crusade, incredibly brutal military campaign, but a campaign that ended up with the conquest of two major cities, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Crusades were also invited into a third, Edessa, as well as conquering various other smaller towns. That's the extent of the First Crusade. The Seljuk invasions created an empire from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean seacoast. And so that in a sense puts the Crusades in their proper place. You get a sense of the differing scales of these various wars of conquest. And it does make the point. The Crusades are not the biggest show in town. There are much broader, much more sort of fundamental shifts taking place. But the Crusades are better known. And if you'll Forgive me, a slight digression on this. One of the questions that's often asked is who are the greatest warriors of the medieval period? Is it the Crusader knights or the Templars, or is it the Japanese samurai, or is it the Mamluk warriors of Egypt? The point I would make is that whether we're talking about the Seljuk Turks, whether we're talking about the Mongols who come a century and a bit later, or whether we're talking about the various other invasions out of the Central Asian steppe region, this is the era of the mounted nomadic archer. This is not the era of the Crusader night, or indeed any warrior created by an agricultural society. Nomadic civilizations are very dominant in this phase of Eurasian history, and I wanted to write a history of the Crusades that presents them within that broader context.
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Thomas Small
I'm glad you mentioned the Mongol invasions, which did happen 150, 200 years later after the Seljuks arrived. And, you know, the Seljuk invasions were not nearly as destructive as the Mongol invasions. And yet, reading the introduction of your book in which you outline the arrival of the Seljuks, I couldn't help but think of it as a kind of trial run of the tremendous devastation that that next wave of step nomad warriors into the heartlands of the world would cause. And all of that made me think kind of really broadly, because we recently had Laura Spinney on the show talking about her book Proto, in which she talks about the rise of the Indo European language family. And because the rise of Indo European took place in that same zone, that steppe zone. And in fact, some scholars suggest that it was these early Indo European speakers who actually invented step nomadism. But you just see zooming way out, just how totally in waves productive of chaos the steppe nomadic world was. And the Crusades are a response, one of many responses to the destabilizing effects of one of these waves, the Seljuqs. Now, you said that this was the age of the mounted archer. I want to talk a little bit about the military power of the Seljuqs, because we call them nomads. I think maybe, like me, most people have in their minds something like, I don't know, camels and people moving around with sheep and stuff, or maybe like Native American ideas of teepees. You know, I don't know what people imagine when they hear nomads, but they may not think really in terms of, like, structured military power, but you make it clear that that's not really true. The nomadism of the Seljuks is not just some primitive. It's certainly not primitive, really social organization. It was the basis of a powerful military system.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah. Central Asia is the seedbed of so much change, as you quite rightly point out. Whether that change is to do with language or diet or the transmission or creation of new ideas and technologies, there's a lot taking place in Central Asia that fundamentally shifts the wider world around it. Not just the galloping hooves of nomadic light cavalry. These are organized civilizations. And indeed, although the sort of the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols are often described as being very different, it's very notable that when an envoy went to the Mongols, he commented that the best way to tell the difference between a Turkish warrior and a Mongol warrior is that the Mongols do up their robes on one side and the Turks do up their robes on the other. If that's the biggest difference, then that gives you a sense of how similar these cultures are. And in fact, later on, the Mongols seem to have shown quite an affinity for the various Turkish peoples they met in the Middle east in some cases. It's not universal by any means, but. But yes, we're talking about the wider process of the conquest of the Middle east from Central Asia, but within that, there is a second conquest taking place, which is the fact that often when you get an invasion from the Central Asian steppe, it's a case of conquering the conquerors, in that the conquerors themselves often convert to local religions, adopt local
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Thomas Small
practices, adopt cultural motifs and ideas, become urbanized, civilized, literate.
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Nicholas Morton
It can be like that. Although, of course, even before that, on the Central Asian steppe, we're talking about empires that are able to coordinate millions of square miles of territory. So they already have a fairly high level of sophistication, albeit in a very different context to that of agricultural societies.
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Thomas Small
Well, before we move on to the Crusades themselves, I would like to talk a little bit more about how medieval Middle Eastern government actually worked. Because really, once the Crusaders are in the Middle east and they establish their various polities, as you said, in Antioch, in Edessa, in Jerusalem and other places, as the Crusades unfolded, they more and more became Middle Eastern polities. And so they were participating in a form of Middle Eastern government that I think is very hard for modern people to grasp because it is totally unlike the way government happens today. So on paper, you have the Abbasid Caliphate, and it. It sort of claims to universal Muslim rule from its capital in Baghdad. It is contested in that regard by the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. But then even within the Abbasid lands, it's not really centralized. There is a uniform Persianate imperial administration. But the further you get, sort of closer to the ground, you realize that it's almost like a city state world where each city has a military commander or an emir or an atabeg or whatever you want to call this person who has more or less complete control over that city and its hinterland and may wage war against another city in the same caliphate, against a Muslim. It is difficult, I think, to understand exactly how that world was governed. Can you help us understand it?
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Nicholas Morton
Sure. So before the Seljuk invasions, before the Crusades, there was a time when the Abbasid Caliphate spanned from North Africa all the way across to the borders of the steppe country. And it was reasonably united, reasonably sort of coherent, and very powerful, both commercially and militarily. Its great sparring partner was the Byzantine Empire. But then over time, the empire as a whole began to decline slowly. Major cities like Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul began to go their own separate way. And new dynasties arose that ruled those cities as sort of quasi independent states, albeit paying lip service or at least acknowledging spiritually their subordination to the caliphate as a whole. And then we're still about well over a century before the Crusades. There's a huge upheaval in Egypt when an Ishmaeli Shia Islamic movement called the Fatimids arises and conquers Egypt, establishing a new capital for themselves at Cairo. And that is entirely hostile to the Sunni Abbasid caliphate. So before the Crusades, before the Seljuk Turks, you have these two caliphates, one in Cairo, one in Baghdad, with many of the city states in between, acknowledging the authority of one or the other, but broadly speaking, doing their own thing. And then the Seljuk Turks conquer much of the Abbasid Caliphate. They acknowledge the Abbasid Caliph's authority for the most part, although that's not an easy relationship at all. And they too, see the Fatimids as their great opponent, because the Fatimids, firstly, the Fatimids are able to defeat the Seljuks when they try to invade Egypt, but also as the Seljuk Turks, slowly, over time, adopt a Sunni Islamic identity and faith that sets them up very much in opposition to the Shia Islamic Fatimids in Egypt. And the frontier of war between the Seljuks and the Fatimids runs through Jerusalem. So Jerusalem, it's already a war zone.
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Thomas Small
I think that's important. There's already a war zone in the Levant when the Crusaders arrive and the existing geopolitical system was already very weakened even before the Seljuqs arrived. The Abbasid Caliphate was fragmented. The centralization that it had once benefited from was more or less gone. But that wasn't really so much my question, not the big geopolitical movements closer to the ground. I mean, one thing I kind of realized when I was reading the book is that power was much more personal than, like, institutional as we would understand it now. I'm not sure if that had always been the case across the Caliphate. Probably not. The Caliphate had inherited from the Romans and the Sasanians something like institutional government. But by the 10th, 11th centuries, is it not the case that it's individual men and their capacity to command armies that matters and that's it. Like, for example, if suddenly that man dies, the man that has managed through whatever charisma and threats and carrots and sticks that he has in his command, you know, he's managed to, let's say, put together a number of such men to form an army, if he dies, that army just immediately disintegrates. There's no institutional cohesion there. Is that right? Power was personal.
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Nicholas Morton
It's heading in that direction. So from an institutional perspective, there are still empires on the map where major institutions, major engines of government are still very present. And the two that come to mind immediately are the Byzantine Empire, where there is still quite a complex bureaucracy shaping the events and the fortunes of the empire, albeit under the rule of individuals. But that's also true of the Fatimid Empire in Egypt, where again, you have various key institutions of state that run what is in fact the most powerful economy anywhere in the Middle East. Egypt is the fulcrum for many trade routes. But elsewhere, with the rise of the Seljuk Empire, it's a little bit more complicated. And I think the easiest way to sort of unlock that structure for the Seljuk Empire is to point out that the Seljuks practice partable inheritance. So when a ruler dies, that means that pretty much any family member, sometimes leading lieutenants as well, will feel they have some stake in who gets to rule next. They may well want to be the next ruler themselves. And there's no clear cut line for who's going to be the next successor. Now, a powerful son would stand a very good chance of getting a big chunk of the power, but that's not guaranteed. And often there's a lot of sons, all of whom are jockeying for position. And that creates an environment where, with the death of a ruler, Often you then have a period of considerable ambiguity and often a great deal of bloodshed as the leading family members all compete either to get themselves into power or for their preferred candidate to get into power. Now the sheer nature of that does tilt towards personal rule and the influence of individuals because they want to get themselves into a position of power and indeed they want to make sure that when they die that same thing will replicate itself. So these things do tilt in that way. Having said that, they do also develop some institutions of government and there are some pre existing institutions of government that continue to function in and within that structure.
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Thomas Small
You know, the world of 10th and 11th century Syria, Iraq, Iran, Anatolia, it brought to mind again and again, and this might surprise you, it might not. It brought to mind again and again the world of the Western Roman Empire. Following the collapse of Roman authority there, when Germanic kings arose, some of them had worked as mercenaries for the Romans, some of them took advantage of the weakening of Western Rome and flooded into the empire to create little states of their own. Eventually a man like Charlemagne could kind of unite them, but then inheritance would be a big problem. Brothers would fight each other. And during the Crusades, the Frankish warriors and the Turkish Arab, Kurdish warriors of the Middle east, they actually had much more in common than maybe one would think. And perhaps it's because actually for hundreds of years they're already inhabiting a very similar political economy, to some extent, a similar martial ethos, to another extent, a similar kind of monotheistic religion that had combined with an inherited pagan tradition. So they're actually very similar. And that is one way in which the binaries through which we normally see the Crusades just breaks down and you realize that is this like one massive civilizational block against another or just a larger iteration of a general kind of of civil war situation across Eurasia, if that makes sense.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah, and it's fascinating when people think about the Crusades, it's very common to hear the words clash of civilizations or hate, or just this idea of two religious blocks head to head thumping each other until one proves superior. And I'm not denying there is an underlying religious conflict in this era, albeit amidst other conflicts. But as for the way in which the various different protagonists view each other, I mean, the Seljuk Turks and their various satellites are the primary opponent of the first Crusade. Most of the battles are against Turkish armies, and at times the Crusade is in what they wrote down following the campaign. And sometimes they're hostile towards them, but they admire them too. There's a great passage in one of the earliest accounts we have from a first crusader where he actually says the Franks or the Western Europeans and the Turks are the only peoples who can be real knights. That's a statement of admiration. And that statement is much bigger than just saying we acknowledge the Turks to be combat effective. Being a knight, being a warrior, the warrior ethos of this era, it shapes your entire behavior. Yes, it expects you to be valiant on the battlefield, but it expects you to show other people qualities as well. The Crusaders often admired their Turkish opponents and their Turkish opponents often admired them. And they do have a lot in common. And you could say, well, how can that possibly be the case? Because the Seljuk Turks are a nomadic culture from Central Asia. Their sort of points of reference are so very different from the deep forests of Western Europe and their castles and all the rest of it. But actually there's still a lot going on that they share. They love horses, they enjoy falconry, they play chess. Their ideas of what constitutes military aristocratic manhood are very similar. So they do have a great deal in common. And those qualities come out on several occasions. There's even the idea that they are actually related in their deep roots because they both believe that their descended both. This is true both in Western Europe and indeed among Turkish writers as well. Those writing about the Turks, they both believe they descended from the same son of Noah.
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Thomas Small
Let's talk a little bit about the battle of Manzikert.
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Nicholas Morton
Sure.
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Thomas Small
So this battle occurred in 1071. The Seljuks against the Byzantines. Now everyone knows that the battle of Manzikert was totally world historic because following it, all of Anatolia was flooded with Turks. The Byzantines were really punched in the face. They had to withdraw. And in the midst of their terrible, terrible crisis, they called on their Christian brethren in the west to help them. Now your book makes it clear that that's not really what happened at all, because very quickly after Manzikert, what really happened was something like a civil war within Byzantium in which both sides actually employed Turkmen mercenaries to fight each other again, a sign that it's like not nearly as straightforward as we ever think.
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Nicholas Morton
Yeah, it's not clear cut and you're quite right. So yes, the battle of Manzikert is a battle that occurs when the Seljuk invasions into the Middle east are an advant advanced stage. So by this point they've already conquered Persia, much of Iraq, much of Syria, and now they're pushing into Anatolia, which is the eastern districts of the Byzantine Empire. And by Anatolia, I'm talking about modern day Turkey. So there's various battles and skirmishes and raids, but the battle of Manzikert is a major battle when Sultan Alp Aslan defeats the armies of Romanos IV Diogenes. And that seemed to be a major moment in the Turkish conquests of Anatolia. The Byzantine Empire's eastern frontiers, following which the Sultan goes home. But lots of Turkmen nomads continue to move westwards and yes, indeed, they offer themselves for service to the various Byzantine factions. Whether that actually prompted the First Crusade is the million dollar question. When the Pope launched the Crusade, was the Pope seeking to respond to Turkish advances in Anatolia, looking to help the Byzantine Empire? But possibly it is because the Byzantine specifically asked for help directly before the launch of the First Crusade. Or should we say maybe the Pope launched the Crusade in order to help rebuild the rift that's emerging between the Byzantine Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church by providing help against the Turks. Possibly. Or maybe it's to help Eastern Christians or pilgrims suffering in the Jerusalem area because that area is a war zone. Possibly. Or maybe it's nothing to do with the Middle east at all. Maybe it's to do with the Pope trying to deflect French noble families from killing each other in vendettas by sending them to do something else. Possibly. Or is it something to do with the fact that Urban is facing an anti Pope who is a major threat to his authority and so launching a Crusade cements his position as Christendom's leader? Well, the simple fact is we don't know. We're not ever really told which thought was uppermost in Urban's mind. Although you often find out a modern observer's take on the Crusades based on the factors that they choose to preference. In reality, it could be any of those factors, or perhaps more likely a mixture. There's no particular reason why the Pope shouldn't want to solve all those problems in one go.
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Thomas Small
Well, it certainly made me think again when you were talking about the various reasons why Pope Urban II might have called the Crusade, just how similar the whole world was at that time. Because there you have a Pope. And let's say in a Western Christian context, the Pope is like the Caliph in Baghdad, he's in Rome, he kind of formally governs the whole. He is at the top of the pyramid. There's an anti Pope, a rival to him. So kind of like the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo, another person who claims the same spiritual authority. Then there's an Emperor in Germany, a German Holy Roman Emperor, kind of like the Seljuk Sultan, a kind of more military character with knights and aristocrats and stuff, but actually his power is more nominal than institutional. And on the ground level, you have various counts and dukes and then just knights marauding and wandering around. And the Pope is thinking, God, I gotta get rid of these people. Send them out. And later on, during the Crusades, you'll see various Seljuk Emperors or Seljuk Sultans kind of doing the same thing, sending recalcitrant local leaders westwards to fight the Franks, to kind of get them out of the way so he can create stability in his own imperial zone. The world was so much more similar than we think. And the whole, especially the Middle east, but not just the Middle east, there was a kind of complexity that defies simple description. Anyway, let's move on to the crusades themselves. The First Crusade, which is called in 1095 by the Pope, sort of begins in 1097. The Crusaders cross over into Asia Minor. They campaign through Anatolia. Eventually, they sort of split into two. One force moves into Armenian territory, takes Edessa, or Edessa is granted to it in 1098. But the main force captures Antioch in the same year, and then advances via the coast to Jerusalem, which falls after a siege in 1099. Everyone kind of knows that. One question I want to ask you. Were the Crusaders, these Frankish warriors, knights, especially cruel and violent?
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Nicholas Morton
Yes, at the Siege of Jerusalem, the first Crusaders conducted several massacres over several days. And they seem even to have surprised themselves with the scale of the bloodshed they committed. And that, of course, is very well known. It's one of the sort of the best known moments of the history of the Crusades as a whole. Explaining it is tricky. I mean, often it's ascribed to extreme religious hatred and fanaticism. But there are complexities here. And just to give an example of that complexity, that when the Crusaders advanced into Anatolia later on, Syria, they're basically facing two major empires. There's the Seljuks in Syria for the most part, there's the Fatimids in Egypt. Now, they recognize right at the start, the Seljuks are their major opponents. And the Fatimids realize this too. So the Crusaders send envoys to the Fatimids in Egypt, suggesting an alliance against the Seljuk Turks. And the Fatimids are very interested in this offer. And so there's a round of talks during the siege of Antioch, and there's a round of talks a little bit later as well. And both sides want this alliance to work. So neither the Fatimids nor the Crusaders see any objection to the basic principle of forming a Christian Islamic alliance that works for them because they share an opponent in the Seljuk Turks. The Crusaders best offer to the Fatimids is that they will help them to retake every city they've ever lost to the Seljuk Turks if in return they get to keep Jerusalem. But the Fatimids won't accept this. Their best offer to the Crusaders is that they will allow the Crusaders to conduct their acts of reverence to the holy sites in Jerusalem. But then they must go home. But both sides are offering compromises. Both sides want this alliance to happen. And it's only a few months before the Crusaders lay siege to Jerusalem that the talks break down. But then that raises a question of, well, how do we explain the extremity of the massacre, which was indeed extremely violent? There's various factors in the mix. Some historians have explained it by saying, well, this is quite common for medieval sieges in that if a population in a city refuses to surrender, refuses to submit before the besieging army crosses the walls, then medieval armies will normally see it as being almost sort of their right, in their eyes, to sack the city. And yet the siege of Jerusalem goes a lot further than that. It may be something to do more with the sort of the spiritual nature of Jerusalem. It's the epicentre of what the Crusaders are trying to achieve. And perhaps for Jerusalem itself, they saw the idea of any non Christian presence in Jerusalem itself as being intolerable, even though they were prepared to ally and conduct negotiations elsewhere. Maybe it's a sort of pressure release. They've been marching for years to get to Jerusalem, and now they've crossed the walls. Maybe that is some sort of release from that tension built up over those years. But interpreting what exactly they're doing and why at the siege of Jerusalem is not as straightforward as it might seem.
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Thomas Small
I remember when I was first in university reading a Latin. I'm not in Latin, a translation of a Latin account from the time of the conquest of Jerusalem. And the Latin writer himself was almost glorying in the amount of blood that was flowing through the streets of the city during the conquest, during the slaughter, almost like the city was being baptized in blood or something. Purified through violence. The degree of violence in general and brutality in the story, not just on the Frankish side, perhaps particularly on the Frankish side, but on all sides, is bewildering. But let's stick to the Frankish side a bit more. Five years after the fall of Jerusalem, during the siege of Acre on the coast, King Baldwin of Jerusalem, he was coercing the city. He was laying siege to it, hoping that they would surrender. He wanted to acquire Acre intact because, you know, a broken city was not as valuable to him in his larger geostrategic calculations. His Italian allies, however, they were very angry that he was negotiating a surrender with the city. They wanted plunder.
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Unidentified Speaker
And.
- [37:47]
Thomas Small
And even though he did succeed in negotiating this surrender with the patriarch of Jerusalem as a mediator, as the population of Acre departed, the king's allies slaughtered them anyway and plundered the city. It's like I'm reading this thinking, I can't imagine myself into the minds of these people, so cruel. And then, you know, especially. And you start the whole book with an epigram from the Bible about Jesus Christ teaching his followers to love their enemies. And so how am I supposed to make sense of this? I suppose I would say that in a Muslim context, the dynamics of war and conquest and therefore killing, it actually sort of makes more sense because martial virtues, if you want to put a positive gloss on them, has a place within the Quranic revelation in a way that in the Gospel, they just don't really have. And yet it's the Christians in the story who are particularly violent. So it's hard to make sense of this.
- [38:51]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah. And what you've put your finger on there is, for me at least, a starting point in why I became interested in the study of the Crusades. Oh, a long time ago now, almost a quarter of a century ago, because it didn't make sense to me. I'm a practicing Christian myself and I read what Jesus says, love your enemies, do good to those that hate you. And that's why I included those verses at the start of my book, because I wanted to flag up right from the beginning that there is a dilemma here. We're talking about the history of Christian holy war, but this is a religion in which Jesus said to beat your spears into plowshares how those two very different forms of behavior, how they ever came together, how a religion that structures, encourages its adherents to love their enemies, could ever think it was acceptable to wage holy war. That's a question that has lingered in the back of my mind for decades. And it's a difficult one to explain. I'd say even today I don't fully feel I get it as much as I'd like. And by get it I mean understand what it is that's going through their heads. But I think it goes something like this. And I think you have to go quite a long way back. There's sort of a long process of development that takes place. But I would go back to the period when the Roman Empire Christianizes, sort of 4th, 5th century, that sort of era. The Roman Empire is a military empire. It has big armies, it's always been military, conducting wars of conquest. And yet it has just adopted or is in the process of adopting the Christian faith, which offers a very different view on violence and the use of coercion and bloodshed and things like that. So when the power brokers in Rome, the powerful, the elite families, the people who make decisions, my feeling has always been that they realize that their empire is Christianizing. And so whether out of conviction or simply because that's the way the tide is flowing, they adopt Christianity for themselves. But there are certain things they won't part with, such as a Roman army, a Roman Empire's frontier defenses. They want an interpreted version of Christianity that has has been worked to fit with the established norms of the Roman Empire that they are not prepared to yield. And so you have writers coming up with things like just war theory, St. Augustine, that there are certain conditions under which rulers can go to war. And so already we see a step change. But then the Roman Empire collapses, or the Western Roman Empire does, and all these various other peoples move into the area and also adopt Christianity. And I always come back to sort of variant on the Gospels produced in Saxon territory. And it gives you an insight into how they're viewing Christianity because it's not Jesus and the disciples. And Jesus doesn't go for 40 days into the desert, it's Jesus and his thanes. And Jesus is born in the hillfort of Bethlehem. And Jesus doesn't go into the desert, he goes into the deep forest. And so we get a sense of Christianity being interpreted into, in this case, Saxon culture. And I think that there is this process of a culturation where aspects of Christianity are adopted by different peoples in a sort of organic development. But here's the catch. There's always an anxiety around warfare. And so spooling forward a few hundred years to say, the Battle of Hastings. Everyone's heard of the Battle of Hastings when William the Conqueror defeated King Harold and conquered England. After the Battle of Hastings, the Norman warriors still confessed the sins they had committed during the battle. In other words, one minute they're killing their enemies, the next minute they're apologizing for it with the full knowledge they'll carry on doing that in the future. Yeah, so. So there is always a tension. Doesn't matter how much acculturation takes place. People are anxious about shedding blood in the name of the Christian religion. And this is only a few decades before the First Crusade. The First Crusade is the next big step change where the Papacy. Papacy's been experimenting with this previously a little bit already, but the papacy actually goes the next stage, which is to say that there aren't just, just wars that God will tolerate and there aren't these sorts of half measures of, well, fight a battle and then confess it afterwards. But this is something different. This is a holy war. This is a war God actually wants. And so we see there the moment when that shift takes place.
- [43:41]
Thomas Small
Yeah. It is fascinating, this question of how Christians over the centuries have made their peace with war in various ways. I know in the East Roman Empire, I mean, I'm an Orthodox Christian, so I'm kind of more focused on the fathers of the Church from the Greek speaking East. And I know that they, in the 4th and 5th centuries were wrestling with this question a lot. They believed that a warrior, even one fighting for the Christian emperor, would invariably contract sin to himself by his military activities. And so after returning from war would, I think the penance was like three years without communion, you'd have to confess your sins. So it always remained part of the Christian conscience that war was a stain on the soul, and yet a stain that we needed to accommodate. We have now got far away from the Middle east where we want to be situated, just like in your book. So let's veer back to the Seljuk world. In the decade or so before the Crusaders arrived, the Seljuks had a kind of civil war of their own going, which weakened them a bit, allowing to some extent the Crusaders to make those gains. That civil war ended in 1105. And yet the new Seljuk Sultan did not prioritize confronting the Crusaders. Another sign that, that the Crusades were something like, as you say, a sideshow to the main event. Instead, the new Sultan focused on fighting the Nizari Ismailis. These are the famed Assassins in their sort of almost legendary mountain fortress of Alamut in northern Iran. These were the Sultan's priority. He must deal with them. Why? Why did the new Seljuk Sultan kind of ignore the Crusaders for at least the time being and focus on the Nizari Ismaili, the assassins.
- [45:27]
Nicholas Morton
So, yeah, the New Sultan, in 1105, Sultan Muhammad's got a real. A really difficult job ahead of him. His empire has been in a state of civil war for over a decade. Following the death of the previous sultan, he was able to rule the entirety, which is Sultan Malik Shah. So he has to stabilize the situation. He has to regain control over the empire's various core districts. The area the Crusaders conquered is not a core district. That's far out to the west, but he has to control his core territories.
- [45:58]
Thomas Small
The capital, I should say to the listeners, is in Isfahan. So it's an Iranian capital so far away from the Levant.
- [46:05]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah. And so he's got to consolidate his local position. But he's also, because, as is often the case when an empire goes through a period of civil wars, all sorts of threats emerge on various different frontiers. And yes, the Crusades are one such threat, but there are others as well. So he has multiple frontier threats to worry about. And as you quite rightly point out, he also has additional internal threat because the Ishmaelis, who are viewed with intense hostility by the Sunni authorities across the Seljuk Empire, they have been growing in number. They've also been becoming a great deal more ambitious. They're still not strong enough to meet, say, a Seljuk field army head to head, but they're growing more powerful. Now, for comparison, where the Ishmaelis are in the Seljuk's heartlands, the Crusaders, their conquest took place on areas that were only ever really borderlands, territories between the Seljuk Sultanate and the Fatimids, or the Seljuk Sultanates and the Byzantines. And so the Ishmaelis are a bigger concern for the Seljuk Sultan. And there's intense persecution of the Ishbayades as the Seljuks try to force the Ishmaelis to submit or try to sort of reduce the threat they pose. They have a series of big fortresses in Persia, modern day Iran, around Alamus and elsewhere, but they also have a presence in northern Syria, and that presence grows considerably. And it's interesting that in the early years of the Crusader states, that's the territories established by the First Crusade. There's quite a lot of conversation taking place between the Nizaris and. And the Crusader states. And there's even moments where they explore allying with each other because, again, they've got a common opponent in the Seljuq Turks in their various satellite states.
- [48:01]
Thomas Small
Yeah, it's incredibly complex. And so really, by the 1110s, there are three major kind of dimensions, if you like, to the chessboard. I mean, that's a lot of mixed metaphors there. But so you have. By the 1110s, you have the Seljuk Sultan, Sultan Muhammad.
- [48:17]
Podcast Sponsor/Advertiser
Muhammad.
- [48:17]
Thomas Small
He's trying to restore and to solidify the great Seljuk's authority over the whole zone, including over the rulers of Syria, who are nominally subordinate to him, especially in Aleppo and Damascus for our story. But though nominally subordinate to him, they're really very independent. So he wants to crack down on their independence and make them really obey him. And this, to some extent, required him to confront the Crusaders, but would also create a situation where often Aleppo would ally with some Crusaders, Damascus would ally with other Crusaders. They would sometimes fight each other and fight the great Sultan. I mean, totally confusing and amazing and weird. So you have that dynamic. You have the Crusader states. They want to solidify the possessions they've already gained, and then they want to extend their victories into inland Syria, which means confronting Aleppo in Damascus, with whom they're sometimes also allied against the other. Very confusing. And then you have Aleppo and Damascus themselves, who wanted protection against Frankish expansion, but also feared what the great Sultan wanted to do to them, which is subordinate them. So it's a very thorny picture. And that's just the 1110s. I mean, there's another 70 years to your story. I mean, I'm telling you, dear listeners, you might must read the book yourselves. We can't cover it all.
- [49:41]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah, the battle lines of this era are complicated. Often when you talk about the Crusades or people talk about the Crusades, it's almost like they could take a picture of the Middle east, draw a line down the middle and have Christians on one side, Muslims on the other side, and they're fighting over religion. Well, yes, there is holy war and conflict taking place along religious lines, but there are wars fought by, as you say, the Seljuk Sultan, trying to reassert authority. There's fighting between different dynasties from multiple different groups. There's wars over trade routes. There's wars between personalities. There's sheer opportunism. There's wars being fought by different Groups of nomadic peoples over the best grazing. It's a much more complicated picture. So, absolutely. It's not as simple as is often made out.
- [50:29]
Thomas Small
It's almost as complicated, Nicholas, as the Middle east today.
- [50:35]
Nicholas Morton
Well, that's an important point. I think that often when people look at the Middle east in any period, there's a tendency to try and caption it. And social media doesn't help because the sheer brevity of social media means that people are encouraged to caption all sorts of things. But it's a messy environment. There's a lot of things going on.
- [50:53]
Thomas Small
It's messy. And it's not just conflictual. One thing that you reveal across the book are friendships, sometimes peculiar friendships that arise between Frankish knights and Muslim knights. They might be Kurds, they might be Turks, they might be Arabs, whatever. It's not always a story of conflict. It is sometimes a story, quite a moving and chivalrous story of courtly friendship. Knightly friendship, yeah. But I would like to talk about Damascus because it becomes, over time, in a way, a kind of a fault line in all of these different zones, between the Crusaders and the Seljuks, between the Fatimids and the Seljuks, between Jerusalem and Antioch. It's sort of right there in the Middle, and it becomes a very important city. Everyone's trying to conquer it.
- [51:34]
Nicholas Morton
You're right. Damascus is a linchpin. And Damascus is interesting from a military perspective because it is one of the big capitals of Syria, and there are both various Turkish dynasties and various Crusader states, all of whom want to conquer Damascus because it has that sort of linchpin quality. But Damascus is more than that, too, because, again, this strikes very much at my reasons for being interested in the Crusades as a whole, that within Damascus you will have, say, people eating foods from Egypt, Georgia, Central Asia, the Byzantine Empire. You'll have people playing chess, which is an Indian invention. People will be wearing silks, particularly the better off, which will arrive in many cases from China. They'll be travelers passing through Damascus from the Black Sea region, from the Indian Ocean region, from Egypt. People will be passing through Damascus in part to visit the holy sites in Damascus itself, or perhaps Muslims traveling south on pilgrimage to Mecca, among other places. And so Damascus is fascinating not just for its political, military significance. And this also comes into why I called the book Part of It Being a Global History, that what goes in Damascus, like what goes on in the Middle east, reflects changes taking place not just at a regional level, but to some extent at least, certainly on a continental Level bringing in parts of Africa and Eurasia. So much of what goes on in the Middle east is a fulcrum for what takes place elsewhere.
- [53:15]
Thomas Small
Tell us about. Since we're talking about Damascus, tell us about this guy, if that's how you pronounce his name, Tughtakin of Damascus. So he is Turkic. He was a remarkably successful leader of a city at that time. I think he ruled over Damascus for like 30 years. He was sort of semi Islamified, but still very Turkic in much of his behavior. He loved drinking. He engaged in drinking bouts. I think this is something that he had in common with his Frankish erstwhile enemies, allies, whatever. I like the anecdote that he drank from a cup fashioned from the skull of a Frankish lord. You know, this is the sort of thing we imagine from Dark Ages, Western Europe. You know, like some kind of crazy Germanic barbarian drinking from a skull. No, no. The Emir of Damascus was doing this in the 12th century. He scalped his enemies. You know, this guy was serious. He was a serious dude. He was also very shrewd. And I wonder you could tell us a little bit about him. I particularly like the story of alliance with the Atabeg of Mosul Maudud, who in Damascus reached. Well, I won't give it away. Tell us that story.
- [54:28]
Nicholas Morton
Sure thing. So, yeah, Tagdaquin's a fascinating character. He is a scarred veteran of the Seljuk conquest. He's fought everywhere. He's fought under every leader. He is exceptionally capable warrior and leader. But as such. Such, he's also a transitional figure because, as you say, the Seljuk Turks go through what is increasingly becoming apparent as a long term transition from the shamanistic Central Asian beliefs of their forefathers in many cases, through to Sunni Islam. And that takes place. That movement takes place over a long period of time, far longer than people have thought previously. To give an example from the First Crusade, the First Crusade is observed many Turkish warriors burying their dead with grave goods. Well, that's a Central Asian practice, so that those grave goods can serve them in the afterlife.
- [55:22]
Thomas Small
It's actually, Nicholas, it's a step practice because as we know, Germanic warriors and Huns and all these people, they also buried their ancestors with grave goods.
- [55:32]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah, and you mentioned the drinking practices. Again, that can be traced back to Central Asian practices. So Tahtakhin is a fascinating character because he is within the process of conversion to Islam, but there are still lots of elements of his former culture and beliefs there too. And of course, given the Seljuk Turks are in Charge. They can pick and choose what they do and don't accept. But yes, he is initially the Atabeg, so he's initially a regent for the ruler of Damascus and later ruler himself, and he faces the First Crusade. So initially he fights the Crusaders and loses. And then a couple of years later, the Crusaders conquer Jerusalem. And a few months after the Crusader's conquest of Jerusalem, Tughtakhin puts together a big army and marches in the opposite direction, heading towards southern Turkey. And that simply makes the point that there are other agendas at work here. The Crusade is just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. The reason he's going towards southern Anatolia is because he wants to follow up on his dynastic claim to a town that he feels that he or his mosque should own in southern Anatolia. So the Crusades for him are one threat among many, not necessarily the most important. In later years, he fights the Crusaders a bit, but when the Sultan sends armies to try and force him to acknowledge his subservience, or he even fears maybe replacement as governor of Damascus, he begins to start resisting the Sultan, in some cases working with the Crusaders. So, as you say, there are all sorts of pressures in his world. And one of the examples of this is where Maud Maudud is the Turkish governor of the city of Mosul, modern day northern Iraq. Maudud arrives in Damascus to wage jihad against the Franks, the Crusaders. Well, Tughtakin is entirely willing to support Maudud in that venture. And so they cross the frontier and wage a very successful campaign against the largest of the Crusader states, the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And then they go back to Damascus and there's all sorts of celebrations taking place. And then Maudut is walking with Tughtakhien out of the Great Mosque in Damascus when suddenly someone steps forward and stabs him to death. And the question is why?
- [57:57]
Thomas Small
I immediately thought, reading it, I thought, it's an assassin. It's one of these Nizari Ismail assassins.
- [58:03]
Nicholas Morton
And it could be. And certainly the Nizaris do murder various different people, Turkish leaders, who of course have been repressing them for years, so that wouldn't be impossible. And yet there are other contemporary commentators, people from the time, who say this also really does serve Tughtakhien's interests too. Is it really helpful for Tughtacheen, once the campaign has been wonderful, to have this very powerful Turkish ruler with a very large army in the neighborhood of Damascus? Is this in fact an attempt for Tahtakhi, now that he no longer needs Maudut's support, to actually get rid of him because he started to fear his replacement. And that conversation has never been resolved. But those are the various sort of ideas in circulation around it.
- [58:51]
Thomas Small
What a gallery of rogues. Honestly, this story, which we've only scratched the surface of. When I look at my notes here, things I want to talk to you about you to talk about warfare as kind of aristocratic performance. You write about that at one point. It's like how to understand the way these knights are fighting war. Why can they be so ferocious against each other one minute and then boon companions the next? It's a very strange world, different from the world we inhabit. I wanted to introduce the listeners to someone like Osama bin Munkud, an incredible character with an incredible role to play, not just in the story, but in the historiography of the Crusades. When I was a student at soas, I had to read Muqidd in the original Arabic, I'm proud to say, and I loved it and it completely cracked open the Crusades for me back then, as your book has done for me now. I wanted to talk about the way in which the Frankish Crusader states kind of inverted the dhimmi system of Islam, where suddenly Muslims were second class citizens who had to pay a special tax and whose religious freedoms were slightly curtailed. So. So that's a fascinating dimension of the story. Muslims are suddenly on the back foot and probably feeling, you know, well, in fact, it's not so straightforward as you make clear. Some of them were perfectly happy to live in the Crusader states compared to inland Syria, where some of this Seljuk chaos was much less attractive or much less appealing. But what, let's say, because I am an orthodox Christian, I guess I want to kind of round up the conversation on Byzantium. Byzantium remains, throughout the whole story, a key player, especially in the 11, 30s, 40s, 50s, they kind of come back in a big way. We know now in retrospect that East Rome in the end would not recover Anatolia, certainly not the Levant. But at the time, nobody knew that. East Rome remained strong, it remained proud, it remained confident. The emperor from his throne in Constantinople with those fabled, you know, robotic lions in his splendor looks out at the world, into Anatolia and the Levant and Syria, and probably just thinks, these squabbling barbarians, we will take care of them in the end. We'll be back. He knew it in his head, even though we know he was wrong. And so explain the role of Constantinople across these first couple of crusades, across the 12th century, in what way did they remain a primary Great power in the dynamics of the period.
- [61:28]
Nicholas Morton
So when we talk about the Byzantine Empire, all we're really talking about is the Eastern Roman Empire. There's no break, there's no moment where people suddenly stop saying, well, we were Romans, now we're Byzantines. It's a much later label. And so because they have that pedigree, that history going back for thousands of years, they are very much this sort of iconic empire of dominating much of Western Anatolia, the Aegean Sea, Greece, parts of the Balkans, with their capital at Constantinople. And the Byzantines wanted assistance. So right even before the First Crusade they're asking for help and they're used to doing this because it's very customary for large mercenary groups from Western Europe to arrive in Byzantium, seek service, fight in the Byzantine army and then go home. Now, exactly what the Byzantine Emperor at the time of the First Crusade, Emperor Alexios, exactly what he thought he was going to get when he asked for assistance isn't clear, but it's quite possible that all he was really expecting was a few thousand mercenaries. What he got was perhaps 100,000 people, including large numbers of non combatant pilgrims who are en route to Jerusalem and won't necessarily do what he says, but they are willing to help out, at least initially. And so the Crusaders help the Byzantines to retake the big city of Nicaea, and then the Crusade sets out towards Syria and the Byzantines follow in their wake, collecting towns and cities that the Crusaders have passed through. So the Byzantines do tremendously well from the First Crusade in its early phases. But at the siege of Antioch, things begin to get a bit unstuck because the Crusaders took an oath to the Byzantine Emperor that they would return any formally Byzantine controlled cities.
- [63:26]
Thomas Small
Nicholas, my Orthodox blood is beginning to boil here. My Orthodox blood is beginning to boil.
- [63:33]
Nicholas Morton
On the other hand, it seems likely that the Emperor assured the Crusaders that he would provide them with logistical support. So the Crusaders lay siege to Antioch and the Byzantines, they send some ships to support them. There's some Byzantine troops in their army, but they don't feel that they've been adequately supported, particularly as Turkish field army after army attacks them and tries to lift the siege and the Byzantine Emperor doesn't arrive. And so the Crusaders, when they take Antioch, the Crusade command commander Irmond of Taranto claims it for himself. Now, for the Byzantines, this is absolutely crystal clear. He has broken his oath, end statement. That is all that needs to be discussed. And so he is in breach of that oath. He is therefore an enemy. The Crusaders don't feel that they were adequately supported during the siege and that evidence is their claim for holding onto it. But this is the seed of a dispute that will run FOR well, about 170 years and never get resolved. The Byzantines claiming Antioch and the Crusaders resisting those claims. It only really gets resolved in 1268 when the principality of Antioch finally collapses.
- [64:50]
Thomas Small
The seeds were certainly sown for great mistrust between the western and the eastern sides, kind of climaxing with the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople in 1204. And of course, though I said my Orthodox blood was boiling now, now it's back down to room temperature because any exposure to actual history reminds you that any sectarian narratives, they just come smashed to bits as soon as you realize that all sides were. Well, it's a gallery of rogues. They're all just doing what they need to do. So moving into the 1130s, 1140s, a more kind of resurgent Byzantium appears on the scene under John and Manuel.
- [65:25]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah, it's Emperor John, and then after John, it's Emperor Manuel. So for a long time, initially there's warfare and after that, there's a fair amount of mistrust between the Principality of Antioch, one of the northernmost Crusader states, and the Byzantine Empire. It has to be said, the southern Crusader states, the county of Tripoli, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, they get on with the Byzantines much better. But Antioch, that mistrust is there for a long time. Until 1130s, Emperor John II leads an army into southern Anatolia with a series of objectives, one of which is to force Antioch to submit. And amidst the political chicanery of this, a new compromise is hammered out whereby Antioch remains under Frankish rule but acknowledges Byzantine overlordship, which is sort of the midpoint. And over later decades, including during the Second Crusade, that relationship is constantly under tension. The Franks sort of resisting, owing much loyalty to the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. The Byzantine emperors trying to enforce that overlordship. It's always an uneasy relationship, but they do sort of make it work for some periods of time at least.
- [66:42]
Thomas Small
Well, Nicholas, you know, I wish we could just tell the whole story. It's fantastic. Obviously we've just told like the first third of it. Eventually the Zengids are going to come to power. This is a strong dynasty that begins centered in sort of northern Mesopotamia, begins to slowly but surely impose something like unity across the zone. The Kingdom of Jerusalem's brief period of something like splendor even. It's almost romantic, especially under its queen Melisande. I mean, an incredible character and a wonderful moment. I wish that a proper Hollywood movie would be made about her. And then, you know, the collapse of the Fatimid and the Byzantines, the Franks, the Zengids, all sort of competing to take Egypt, in the context of which a certain fellow by the name of Saladin rises to power, climaxing in 1187 with the battle of Hattin and Saladin's conquest of Jerusalem. It's a fantastic story. You tell it so well. And to kind of end this conversation, I just want to. I wanna zoom out again, as I'm wont to do, and. And talk about some larger historical forces. Because as I was reading the book and reaching the end, I realized that the story you told had exposed just how chaotic the world was at that time. We talked about how the Seljuk invasions were a kind of first run of the Mongol invasions, which were just like the next phase, even more destructive. Baghdad would be destroyed. And basically I came away thinking about the Steppe, about how it had regularly for a thousand years been, to put it in negative terms, almost like vomiting out mounted warriors who destabilized the classical world, the urban, civilized, centralized, imperial zones of the world. And it took like a thousand years for that part of the world, the former imperial zones, to recover with the rise of the gunpowder empires of the Safavids, the Ottomans, the Moguls, who were finally able to kind of like keep the steppe at bay. And then, as we know, Moscow really particularly kind of dominating that whole zone for the first time ever. And so I left your book thinking in these broader terms. Like, I've just read an extremely cogent narrative of about 90 years, during which the world was just rocked by chaos from the steppe. It reminded me once again that modernity and its rise, which we all too often situate only in Western Europe, just like we all too often situate the Crusades only in Western Europe. Modernity was a global effort to some extent to keep the step at bay. And modernity, early modernity, 16th, 17th centuries, is. Is these gunpowder empires achieving that. So that's where I left your narrative. I know it veers off from your book itself, but that's what it stimulated in me. I don't know what you have to say about that.
- [69:49]
Nicholas Morton
Yeah, I think something else that makes this period so fascinating is, as you say, the relationship between order and chaos. There's so much warfare and violence going on, and yet the violence itself is complicated. This is a world where. Where warfare isn't conducted like the modern world. This is a world where you can fight in the morning and then have a meal together in the evening. Socializing with your opponents is not unheard of at all. Sharing ideas with your opponents isn't unheard of at all. And even things like trade. So in the Middle east, yeah, emirs of Damascus may well fight against all sorts of. Of enemies, whether they're crusaders or Fatimids or other Turkish leaders. But everyone knows you don't interfere with the trade because everyone's income draws extensively on the big trade routes passing through the Middle East. And so we have this phenomenon observed by one Muslim pilgrim where he says, well, you can have on a field next to the road, two armies fighting each other, but no one's laying a finger on the merchants because they need that income. So there is order within the chaos and in and amongst all this stuff that's going on, whether it's taking place on the battlefield, whether there are encounters at the negotiating table, whether this is merchants hammering out prices in the market, whether this is chance encounters on the road or even meetings taking place in the marriage bed. So many cultures are encountering one another, including many who have no idea of each other's prior existence. And they're meeting in a small area of territory. So much changes hands, so much develops. Knowledge from different parts of the world gets exchanged. New ideas, stories, weapons, technologies, news from distant places, religions. It's all changing hands. And if you'll forgive me, just to sort of finish with a story, you mentioned, Uzama IBN Munqid a bit earlier. He gives a story about how to heal yourself if you're bitten by a leopard. He says that the thing to worry about if you're bitten by a leopard is that mice will feel a magnetic attraction to your wound and want to urinate in it. So what you have to do if you're bitten by a leopard is to get onto a boat and to go out onto a lake or something. And the idea being that mice can't follow you there. And you station around the edges of the lake, just for extra security, a whole series of cats so that they will also keep off the mice so your wound can heal naturally. And there's sort of an extra extrapolation on that story that says, but even then you have to be careful because the mice will hollow out pomegranates, which they will then paddle to your boat to get onto you, to then urinate into your wound. Now, there is a reason I'm telling you this, which is that this story appears in Assyrian history from a young Arab nobleman Born in the town of Shahizar, it also appears in a monastic chronicle produced near Bristol in the Kingdom of England. Things change hands. The fate of the world in this era is decided in the Middle east, not necessarily in terms of an epic conflict between different cultures, but at least as much through the exchange of ideas, games, stories, technologies. And by putting all these different cultures in the same place and their various interactions, whether they're hostile or not, new ideas are forged as different peoples encounter one another. So it's the role of the Middle east as a dynamo in global events. That's what I'm aiming at here. It's showing how within this era, the next phase of the world, or the foundations for that next phase are being laid.
- [74:00]
Thomas Small
Well, Nicholas, you couldn't make your book the Crusader, A global History of the wars for the Middle east feel more relevant. When we look at what's going on in the Middle east now, you talk about order in a certain chaos. I think that's what we're gonna see from now on. As America retreats from the region and all of these different competing zones fight each other. But always zealous, not to upset the trade too badly. It's all very familiar. It's a fabulous story. You tell it judiciously, you tell it with drama, you tell it with all these wonderful anecdotes. You really bring it to life. Nicholas, it's a wonderful book. Even though the Crusades themselves are just a sliver of a much larger story, by telling that larger story, you have shown that the story of the Crusades is much more interesting than anyone ever knew. It's a great story. Netflix? I don't know. Apple TV. Are you listening? Do the 10 season, you know, treatment of the Crusades. What a story. Thank you very much for telling the story. Thank you for coming on Conflicted.
- [75:04]
Nicholas Morton
My pleasure. Thanks so much. It's been great talking to you.
- [75:09]
Thomas Small
That was Nicholas Morton, Associate professor in History at Nottingham Trent University. His book the Crusader Storm is available from all good booksellers. And remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host, Eamon Dean Johnson. Check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a Message Heard Production Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews.
- [75:59]
Unidentified Speaker
Sat.