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From long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Elena Jarninger and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life. Only on History Hit with your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law not available in all states.
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Hank.
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We haven't worked a case in years.
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Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from history hit. The podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders. To find the stories big and small that that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with. Gone Medieval. The year is 1260. It's the height of summer. And as the sun Glares over the desert sands of Egypt. Four envoys mounted on horseback bear down on the ancient and fabled city of Cairo. They've been sent to deliver a message to the new Mamluk Sultan, Qutuz, a former slave soldier who's risen from bondage to seize the reins of power along the Nile. But the letter they bring is not filled with fair tidings, fawning rhetoric or diplomatic niceties. Instead, it warns of a coming storm so bleak that all in its path tremble with fear. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness of your God. And then we will kill your children. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Though this is the age of the Crusader, the storm doesn't rise from the coastal fortresses of the barbarian Christians, nor from the citadels of capricious Syrian sultans. It hails from the step the vast grassland of the far north, home to countless nomadic horsemen, for these envoys are Mongol. They foretell the onset of a Mongol tide, and making good on threats of apocalypse and catastrophe is their specialty. Before arriving on Egypt's doorstep, the Mongols have already crushed the last vestiges of Seljuk resistance in Anatolia, overrun the mountain fortresses of the Nizari assassins and ransacked Baghdad, the long standing jewel of the Sunni Muslim world. For Qutuz, all portents point to more of the same. The Mamluk sultanate stands square in the sights of a 12,000 strong legion of horsemen, ready to strike at the first sign of resistance. Yet in the summer of 1260, resistance is exactly the path Kutuz and the Mamluks choose. When the Mongol envoys present their demands of uncompromising imperium and unconditional surrender, Qutuz responds in a language the steppe nomads no doubt understand. He orders the four ambassadors in prison, then publicly cut in half. Their severed heads are skewered on the ramparts as feed for carrion, a fate usually reserved for petty criminals. It serves as a declaration that Kutuz will not be following the precedent set by his near eastern neighbors. Instead, he's ready to pick up his sword, face the Mongol wrath and take his chances at war.
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Foreign.
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The showdown takes place near an oasis named Ain Jalut and is more than just a battle. It's a defining struggle between two rising superpowers for control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Crusaders, watching from behind the walls of their shrinking coastal kingdoms, are little more than spectators. But they won't remain so for long. The victors, be it Mongol or Mamluk, will turn their focus onto them next. And the last embers of Latin Christendom in the Holy Land will be extinguished. Welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. For the past two weeks we've journeyed across the vast expanse of the medieval world, tracing the turbulent saga of the Crusades. For almost two centuries, these so called holy wars set Christendom's warriors and against the Muslim powers of Egypt and Syria, each fighting for dominion over the scorching deserts and sacred sites of the Holy Land. Endorsed by the Papacy and waged by Western knights in unforgiving lands, the Crusades reshaped the course of the Middle Ages. This is an epic saga of faith, ambition and blood. In our last three episodes, we've charted more than 150 years of history, tracing the course of the Crusades from their explosive beginnings in the 11th century through to the legendary campaigns of the Sultan Saladin, Richard the Lionheart and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick ii. Along the way, we've witnessed lurid and infamous episodes unfolding across medieval Christendom and discovered that this is far more than a straightforward tale of clashing kings and civilizations. If you haven't listened, do go back and dive into those episodes. Today though, we come to the end game. The fall of the Crusader states. And yet the Crusaders themselves have very
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little to do with it.
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The crisis that envelops the Holy Land from the year 1240 and which eventually culminates in the the abandonment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291 is shaped not by Popes or Western armies, but by those in Cairo. And on the step, the Mongols crash into the Near East. Jerusalem falls again in 1244 and the Crusaders are shocked into one last Hail Mary. The Seventh Crusade led by French King Louis ix. Out of the chaos rises a new power, the Mamluks, who steadily dismantle the Crusader world until nothing remains. To help us navigate this final tumultuous chapter of crusading history, I'm joined by historian Nicholas Morton, author of the Mongol Making and Breaking Empires in the Near East. And once we've traced the global story of the fall of the Crusader states, stay with us because Elena is really returning to help me reflect on the legacy of the Crusade and what this 200 year experiment ultimately left behind. Welcome back to God Medieval Nick. It's great to have you with us again.
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It's great to be back on the show. Thanks so much, Matt.
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I think we thought at this point, we know we're heading towards seventh Crusade, seventh in our numbered Crusades, and we're going to bring in the Mongols here. So we were thinking, who can we talk to about Mongols and Crusades? And it's of course, Nick Morton, But I wondered if you could help us out just to give our audience a little bit of a recap. So we're. We're about to hit the seventh Crusade. In broad terms, what's been going on in the Holy Land for the past kind of couple hundred years?
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Okay. So a loss is the answer. Essentially, you're looking at an incredibly complex and fragmented landscape. You've got major empires and territories around. So going back to around the year 1000, for example, you have the Byzantine Empire in the northwest, which controls much of what will be modern day Turkey or Anatolia as it's known then, as well as the Aegean in Greece. And then the remainder of much of the Middle east is made up with various different Arab or Kurdish leaders who are all under the authority of the Abbasid Caliphate. And then in Egypt, you have a separate Shia Caliphate. In the following years then, though, you've got a massive invasion out of the Central Asian steppe region. This is the invasions of the Seljuk Turks, and they conquer the entire region during the 11th century, the Greater part of it anyway. Soon after that, you have the advent of the Crusades and the foundation of the Crusader states in the coastal regions of the Near East. And then about a little over 100 years after that, you have the advent of a new set of invaders with the rise of the Mongols. So we're looking at a very complex region. It was already complex before all these various invasions, but it becomes even more so not just because of the invaders themselves, but because of various other peoples they set in motion. And for me, that's what makes this period so incredibly fascinating. You've got all these different cultures fighting wars, conducting trade, encountering each other for the first time, whether that's peoples whose history in the Middle east goes back for centuries or who are relatively recent.
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Because I think there is a danger, isn't there, of seeing this period that we call the Crusading Period and Crusader states. And we often frame it as very much Christianity against Islam. But there's so much more going on. I think what your work is really great at highlighting is the fact that there are just almost innumerable facets to this. Different cultures, different civilizations, different groups, even within Christians and Muslims, and as well as those alongside them, there is so much more going on than just thinking about it. In terms of Christians attacking Muslims in the Near East.
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Yeah. It's the complexity of the landscape for me is what makes it so interesting. You've got the Byzantine attempt to try and restate their authority in Anatolia. You've got nomadic people struggling against agricultural peoples. You've got interfaith rivalries and rivalries within a faith. And there's many occasions when you've got Christians and Muslims on both sides of the battlefield or where the battlefields involve neither Christians nor Muslims, because ultimately you've got people like the Mongols, who, in their early years, at least, when they're first invading the Middle east, their beliefs, for the most part, center on shamanistic Central Asian practices. So, yeah, it's a very complicated but fascinating area.
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Yeah, yeah. And as we head now into the 1240s, I mean, we all ought to hide, hadn't we? Because the Mongols are coming. That's a pretty scary moment for anybody. If anyone told me the Mongols were coming, I would be out the door like a shot. I wonder. I mean, another unfair question for you here. I've given you two really unfair questions
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to start off with.
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Summing up the crusading period quickly, I wonder if you can kind of sum up for us who the Mongols are, where they come from, and how they become such significant players by the 1240s.
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Okay. So, as I've said, this does happen from time to time, and it is a feature of Eurasian history that there is. There are these sudden invasions out of the Central Asian steppe region. There can be centuries between them. But I think most people will have heard of, say, the Huns invading the Eastern Roman Empire. Our later invasions, such as the Magyars, for example, or the Seljuk Turks, have already mentioned, or indeed the Mongols. But the Mongols themselves, or the Moal people, they began in what would be sort of the northern parts of modern day Mongolia, very much on the borderlands, where the steppe, sort of the wide grassland areas, move into the coniferous forest belt of the far north. And in their origins, they may not have been solely nomadic. Researchers have suggested that they may have actually have roots that go back to the communities who lived in the forest. But they're in a highly complex and very hostile landscape. There's lots of different political factions and different peoples. In Mongolia, as we'd call it today, they're all struggling for ascendancy. And Genghis Khan, or Chinggis Khan, as he's more Accurately known, he's born into a faction that suffered a great deal very recently, and he himself is imprisoned at an early point in his life. And the story of the rise of the Mongol Empire really is very much tied to Chinggis Khan's life. I've often wondered, maybe it's because of the extreme uncertainty and suffering of his childhood, that really, as soon as he's able to, he pushes and carries on, pushing to expand and expand and expand. I wonder if there's a search for security somehow in that. But attacking neighboring peoples, he doesn't always win, but he wins enough. There's no stopping him until eventually, once you get to the early 13th century, he begins to try and expand outside Mongolia. Having conquered all the various peoples within Mongolia, he wages war into northern China. In the 12 teens, I think it's 1218, he begins his advance, or begins his approach on the Middle east with an attack on what's called the Khwarazmian Empire, which controls much of, well, it's Persia, then it would be modern day Iran, and many of the regions neighboring the steppe. From there, he also expands into Central Asia, what we would call today Russia, and ultimately into Eastern Europe. Until, of course, eventually, under his heirs, the Mongol Empire will stretch from the Pacific seaboard to all the way across to the Euphrates river in the Middle east, or indeed to the borders of Poland and Hungary further north.
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Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. You mentioned there that the Khwarezmian Turks are the sort of almost a buffer in a space in between the Mongols as they advance and the Crusader states and the Near East. What impact does the Khwarezmian Turks being displaced by the Mongols have? Do they sort of assault the Near East? Do the people of the near east realize that this might be a forerunner for something else, or do they just have to deal with the Turks that are in front of them at that point?
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Yes. So at this point, the Crusader states are relatively weak compared to the neighboring powers. They're clinging on to a very narrow strip of coastal territory. They're trying to survive more through diplomacy for the most part, interspersed with moments of aggression at times of major crusades. But the really big power on their borders is the Ayyubid Empire. And the Ayyubid Empire is basically the empire ruled by Saladin's heirs. And they spend much of their time fighting amongst themselves. But there is a common threat to all the empires of the Middle east, which is that the Mongols are advancing. And you're right, one of the earliest signs of this advance, a Kind of bow wave almost in military terms, is the tens of thousands of people displaced by the Mongol advance moving west, trying to get out of the way. Of course they are. As you said, if you heard the Mongols were coming, you'd be straight out of the door. I think we all would. And so they're moving west, trying to get out of the way. And many of them are just moving as family groups or as small communities. But the Khwarazmians in the 1230s, they move as a very, very large contingent, including around 10,000 warriors. So they're exceptionally powerful. And 10,000 is probably a bit conservative. They go to the Seljuks in Anatolia, it's modern day Turkey initially, but they're forced to flee from there and they go south into what would be in modern day terms, northern Syria. And they're desperate. They're looking for a new homeland. And the Ayyubids, so Saladin's dynasty in Egypt offers them a new homeland, but they're not offering it for free. In exchange, they want military assistance and they want military assistance against arrival branch of the Ayyubid dynasty in Damascus. And as a result, the Khwarazmians move south to join forces with the Egyptian Ayyubids. And en route they besiege and sack Jerusalem. This is 1244, and Jerusalem at this point is under Frankish or is within the Crusader states. And after that, the Khwarazmians move south and join forces with the Ayyubids on the borders of Egypt, or I think it's just, I think around the region, around the region of Gaza at this point. Meanwhile, the rival Ayyubid faction in Damascus recognizes the threat being posed by the Khwarazmians who have substantially enhanced the rival Egyptian Ayyubid faction. And so they make an alliance with the Crusader states, specifically the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And this goes back to what I was saying about the complexity of the landscape because what we're looking at here is, is a Khwarazmian plus Ayyubid alliance fighting another Ayyubid faction allied with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And the result of this is a very large battle at a place called Forbi. And the result is a catastrophic defeat for the Damascene Ayyubids with their Frankish allies. And so for the Khwarazmians and for the Egyptians, this is an enormous defeat victory. After this, the Khwarazmians are essentially given the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the southernmost and, well, least small Crusader state that's around. And they just settle the landscape. They don't bother conquering the towns or cities. They just move into the countryside around them. And that creates a crisis. And so messengers go back to Western Europe. Meanwhile, the Ayyubid Egyptians attack Damascus, which they managed to conquer for themselves. So this is a period the Mongols haven't appeared yet. There's still some way off. But nonetheless, the events they've played a part in setting in motion are reshaping the region. And that's eliciting very loud cries for help from the Crusader states going back to Western Christendom.
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So we're already in a state of a bit of chaos and havoc being wreaked by the Mongols, but before they've even arrived. So it's not even them doing it at this point, but they're causing what's going on. And as you mentioned, the result of all of this in the near east is that in 1245, Pope Innocent VII calls what we would now know as the Seventh Crusade. And the French king Louis IX takes control, takes the lead in this. Can you tell us a little bit about who Louis IX was and how he ends up being the leader of the Seventh Crusade? Why did he want to do this?
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So Louis personally is. Is an exceptionally pious ruler, even by the standards of the day, and he's also reasonably competent. But he has been born and raised on the stories of his ancestors, almost all of whom have been on Crusade. Louis VIII went on crusade against the heretics in southern France. Philip II went on the Third Crusade. Louis VII went on the Second Crusade. So he has this tradition, plus the fact that he is himself an exceptionally pious ruler. And of course, Jerusalem has just been taken by the Khwarazmians. So there's a network of different factors. One possible explanation people have also given is that he became ill, and he swore when he was ill that if he got better, then he would go on Crusade. Possible Another factor in the mix. But it also helps that in this period, France is getting a great deal more powerful. The wars with the Angevin Empire centered in the Kingdom of England, which ruled much of western France in the 12th century. Most of those lands now have been reconquered by the kings of France. The kings of France have also extended their authority down much, going much closer to the south coast. And in fact, Louis actually builds a port for his crusade at Aigues Mort in southern France. So France is a great deal more powerful. It's going to get a great deal more coherent from a bureaucratic perspective, going forwards a little bit after this Time. So France is going from strength to strength. So Louis capacity to wage a crusade is also increasing. Having said that, Louis takes leadership of the Crusade in part because he's a major crown head, but also because other people in Western Europe at this time are busy with other things. So for example, Emperor Frederick II is busy fighting wars both in Germany and in Northern Italy. The Kingdom of England is a bit of a mess at this time with various conflicts taking place. So really it's France that's going to be able to do this because it's the only one that's not entangled, but other serious concerns or are able to disentangle themselves from serious concerns. You do get other crusaders from other areas, you do get other monarchs who offer a degree of assistance in one form or another. But it's Louis who goes, there's lots
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of opportunity there in the sense that, as you mentioned, incredibly pious people will want to go on crusade and will view it as a kind of a duty. But there was also, we've seen there can be rivalry between crowned heads who head off on crusade, so friction between kings of France and Holy Roman Emperors and kings of France and kings of England. There's not always room for more than one crowned head. So Louis is able to kind of be the main man here. Is it true that we see the Pope toying with the idea of trying to get the Mongols to become allies against the Ayyubids?
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The Pope wants to know more. And so in 1245, the Pope sends out a series of envoys, some going via the Middle east, some through Eastern Europe to the Mongols. Yes, the Papacy is absolutely interested in what can be achieved with the Mongols, but at this point, simply knowing who they are, what they want, what they're trying to achieve, how strong are they, why are they able to conquer so much? These basic questions haven't yet been answered. So they're fact finding missions, as it were, but also trying to work out is there something that can be achieved with the Mongols or even could they be converted, which would be another a big question for churchmen at this time. So all those questions are in play. Louis is potentially interested, but he himself received a demand from the Mongols to submit to Mongol authority. Before this, and only a few years before Louis sets out, the Mongols invade Poland and Hungary and cause enormous devastation to both countries. So the Louis is not under any illusions about the threat the Mongols pose to Western Europe. But Louis sets out on crusade with his fleet and he arrives on Cyprus and there are the beginnings of diplomacy with the Mongols. The Mongols send some Eastern Christians as their envoys to Louis on Cyprus. It's quite an interesting dimension of Mongol diplomacy, actually. If they're approaching a Christian power, they'll often send Christians as their envoys and they will embroider their demands or their sort of the opening offer with passages from the Bible. In a similar vein, when they approach a Muslim power, they'll often try and embroider their diplomacy and their diplomatic letters and things like that with passages from the Quran. So it's quite interesting to see how they carry that out. But within the Mongols correspondence to Louis, it's quite striking really, in some ways you could read them as standard demands. The Mongols should rule the world. This is what they feel that they have been granted and therefore everyone should submit to them. And yet somehow within it there is also a very strong hint they might be open to an alliance at the same time. And so Louis sends out emissaries to the Mongols to try and continue those negotiations. But they never really come to anything, not from Louis perspective.
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And I guess if, if we've got Louis on Cyprus now, that's quite a good place for us to have him sat while we think about what his aims might be. Because from there, you know, he could try and reinforce the Crusader states along the coast in the Levant, he could aim to reconquer Jerusalem, or he could follow in the footsteps of the Fifth Crusade and target Egypt instead. What do we know about what he decides to do and where he goes next?
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The whole question of how to conquer Jerusalem is exceptionally complicated. And it's a question lots of people at the time are writing about and thinking about. Because it's not simply as, it's not as simple as land your army at the nearest point to Jerusalem, march to Jerusalem, besiege it, conquer Jerusalem, go home. No one or none of the sort of the reason of key strategic thinkers are suggesting that as a line of approach. And there's a very good reason for that, which is that a standard crusade, like Louis's Crusade, in fact Louis lingers longer than most. But most crusaders won't be prepared to be away from home for more than say, three, four years. So if Louis took Jerusalem, fine, he might be able to take it and then he'll go and then it will disappear again because it'll be conquered immediately afterwards, because the kingdom of Jerusalem, what's left of it, simply isn't strong enough to defend Jerusalem in the long term. And Louis knows this in many ways. When Frederick II achieved control over Jerusalem via diplomacy, this is A case in point. As soon as the ten year truce with the Ayyubids expired, Jerusalem became imperiled and was ultimately lost entirely in 1244, a mere 15 years after Frederick arranged for it to be included into the Crusader states. So there is a short termism that they're trying to avoid. Yes, they can probably get Jerusalem, but how do they keep it in the long term? And you've got various leaders grappling with that question going all the way back to the Third Crusade. Richard I had very similar conversations with sort of experts, detemplars and hospitallers who are experts in the whole business of campaigning in the Middle East. So there's got to be a different way of doing it. And the solution a lot of people land on is Egypt. Now that might sound like a very strange thing to say. Egypt is a long way away from Jerusalem. How could that possibly be seen as a means to conquer Jerusalem? Well the answer to that is if you just sort of summon up a map of the Middle East. Egypt is the economic center. It's way more valuable economically than any other area. Branches of the Silk Roads from Central Asia and China pass through Egypt. Much of the Spice route trade from Southeast Asia, India crossing the Indian Ocean, then north across the Red Sea to eastern Egypt. All that traffic, or a large chunk of it will then go to Egypt where the goods will be transported to the major cities or taken by canal to Alexandria and Damietta on the north coast for Tron's shipment into the Mediterranean trade. So Egypt is economically crucial. So the thinking goes like this. Many crusading strategists suggest conquering Egypt first. The idea being if Egypt can be conquered with all that revenue under their control and having denied that revenue to their opponents, they can then afford to finance an army big enough in the Middle east for the permanent re establishment of control over Jerusalem. And so this is the thinking conquer Egypt and then establish a position in Egypt and use those resources for permanent control over Jerusalem. And so that's what Louis after. And that's why Louis after that.
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Yeah, fascinating. And I guess there's an extent to which politically as well. If the Ayurvedic in Egypt are largely controlling Muslim held Near east and if you disrupt that, then that's a way to disrupt that whole area before you go there as well as then having all of their wealth and economic power as well. And this sounds a lot like what we saw with the fifth Crusade. The idea is to target Egypt and from there to move towards Jerusalem. And we, we saw The Fifth Crusade have a bit of initial success that looked really, really promising. And then the kind of the wheels fell off. What happened with the Seventh Crusade?
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Well, from Louis's perspective, it starts looking really promising and then the wheels fall off. Okay, so, yeah, there are marked similarities to the Fifth Crusade. So what Louis does is he marshals his forces on Cyprus, and then with his fleet, he attacks the north coast of Egypt, again following the course of the Fifth Crusade by besieging Damietta, which is on the north eastern side of the Nile delta. Now, it took the Fifth Crusade, I forget exactly how long it was, but it was about a year to get into Damietta. But in Louis case, this is very different. So Louis's fleet gathers off the coast, and then from amongst that fleet comes a line of longboats bringing the first assault parties of Louis's Crusade. Now the Ayyubid army is waiting for them on the beach. Lines of archers, lines of troops, ready to receive the attack. And so you should imagine a sort of crossfire as crossbowmen from the approaching boats and archers from the beach begin to exchange barrages of arrows and crossbow bolts, trying to gain the upper hand. And then the Crusaders jump down from their boats and charge in towards the beach. And in the shallows, they're met with the Ayyubid infantry. And there's a big clash in the shallow water. And it's a significant battle, but it does ultimately turn in Louis favor. And so he gains the beach. Now, that wasn't. Again, this is very much, very similar to the Fifth Crusade. The Fifth. Fifth Crusade didn't have too much trouble getting onto the beach. The next question is Damietta. And Damietta is massively fortified. And the current Sultan of Egypt has specifically refortified and resourced and built up his armaments in Damietta so it can resist a very long siege. But here's the catch. The garrison in Damietta, a Bedouin garrison, evacuates the city immediately after Louis takes the beach. And so Louis forces just walk in. So this major frontier bulwark of the Ayyubid's defenses simply collapses. So for the Ayyubid forces, this is terrifying and extremely concerning. They were counting on Damietta to hold the Crusade for a long time, or to hold them entirely, because, of course, they know by now the Ayyubids are fully aware that if we can hold the Crusaders off for a few years, they're not going to be around forever. They're not a permanent feature on the landscape. If we can Just hold them off, then they'll go away. So for the Ayyubids, as for so many previous commanders, playing for time is crucial. You've got to hold the Crusaders off and they will go home. But now Damietta has fallen within a couple of days. And within that the Crusaders have acquired a fully supplied base, all those munitions and a huge pile of food. So things begin to look very worrying from an Ayyubid perspective. Now, meanwhile, the Crusaders advance up the Nile south and of course they're heading ultimately towards Cairo. But Damietta is a little bit. It's a little bit like it's on an island in that there's a main branch of the Nile that goes down to, which leads Damietta to its east. And there is another smaller branch of the Nile which forks a little bit further upstream and then passes down Damietta to the west. So to get to continue their journey towards Cairo, they have to cross that branch of the Nile. And so they reach the point where the Nile forks and they're looking for a way across. And I have to say, if a film producer wanted to create this, it would be an epic scene because you have the Crusaders on one bank of the Nile being supplied by ships coming from Damietta, and they're trying to build an earthen causeway across this smaller branch of the Nile. On the other side of the branch, the Ayyubid army has set up a line of counterweight trebuchets, hurling lumps of rock at this causeway, trying to prevent it being built. And meanwhile you have boats and crossbowmen and archers all trying to hamper the other side. It's an incredible sort of cross river conflict, but it's not going anywhere for the Crusaders. The Ayyubids are doing quite a good job of holding the Crusaders at arm's length. And their main army is just a very short way further north, outside a town called Mansura. So for the Ayyubids, the goal is to keep the Crusaders there. They can't cross the river. For the Crusaders, the goal is to find a way across. But the Ayyubids have another problem, because a Bedouin goes to Louis and says that he knows a place a little bit further down this branch of the Nile where it can be forded. And so Louis forces set out and they find that it can indeed be forded. And so the vanguard under Louis's brother crosses the Nile. And Louis instructions are that once Robert of Artois with the vanguard, has crossed the Nile, he has to wait and then the main army will come across and join him. But Robert of Artwa has other ideas. Not quite clear if it's Robert or the Templars who are with him who are pushing for this, but Robert sets off without waiting for the main army and leads his vanguard of around 700 heavy cavalry in a massive cavalry charge directly into the Ayyubid camp. This takes the Ayyubids utterly by surprise. Robert of Artois forces overrun the entire Ayyubid army. And so the Ayyubid army, realizing the day is lost, begin to pour in huge numbers through the gates of the nearby town of Mansoura, looking for the safety of that town and its walls. So, having routed the entire Ayyubid army, and at the point of victory for the Crusaders and defeat for the Ayyubids, Robert of Artois reforms his cavalry. And we're not sure who gave the advice or whether it was him himself, but he decides that what he's going to do is charge directly into Mansura with his heavy cavalry, and he does that. But heavy cavalry works well in open spaces, but in narrow roads and alleyways, in a packed town filled with wagons and Ayurved soldiers escape the fighting. It doesn't perform so well. And only three of Robert of Artois forces ever got out of that town alive. Robert of Artois, according to one story, did fight his way out of the town, but was killed in the process of doing so. But while all of this is taking place and all this big confrontation near Mansoura is playing out, and again, those. Those listeners who are familiar with the Fifth Crusade will recognize another parallel here is there's another dimension to the conflict which is beginning to emerge, which is that the Ayyubids have got ships onto the main branch of the Nile, and they're using those ships to cut the supply lines, bringing ships down to the Crusader camp near Mansoura. And so the Crusaders begin to starve. They're not getting enough food, and eventually they're getting nowhere against the Ayyubid army. They're running out of food. And the decision is made to withdraw. So Louis army begins to pull back. That withdraws as far as it can. But by this point, sickness is spreading rapidly in the crusading army. And eventually they become surrounded and are forced to surrender, and Louis himself is taken prisoner. So this is a massive defeat for the Seventh Crusade. But as we shall see, this is also not necessarily good news for the Ayyubids.
- [40:19]
A
And I guess we ought to bring in as well. The Ayyubids themselves are in a bit of a mess in Egypt. They're facing their own problems. We've got the emergence of the Mamluks, and I guess we ought to talk a bit who the Mamluks are and how they come to be real power players during this period as well.
- [40:34]
C
Now, the Ayyubids, just like so many dynasties across the Middle east, they are accustomed to deploying Mamluk forces. Now, Mamluk forces are basically people who have been purchased by a ruler or a ruling elite as enslaved people and then converted to Islam and. And trained as elite warriors. Now, lots of dynasties do this across the Middle East. It's standard practice, but the Ayyubids have particularly done it. And one of the reasons for this is as the Mongols advanced across what today would be Russia and Eastern Europe, far to the north, they seized tens of thousands of people who they then sold into the Mediterranean trade and as enslaved people via ports in the Crimea. Now, all of that meant that enslaved people could be purchased at a very low price. And so the Ayyubids buy them in large numbers, and so the MAM regiments get bigger and bigger. But there's a problem, which I'm guessing that many people will be picking up on now, which is that there's only a limit to how large you can make these forces before they start to realize that they've got serious leverage on their own account. But the Sultan's got another problem, which is that he's seriously ill. And I think by this point, it's becoming clear that this is an illness from which he's not going to recover. And that raises a crisis of leadership because his son and heir, Turan Shah, who's in northern Syria, he and his father don't get on. And so it's not as simple as the Sultan just calling for his son and heir to come and take over. He doesn't call for him, and the Sultan dies so suddenly, Ayyub. And Egypt is leaderless. So what happens next? And this is one of the most remarkable aspects of the history of this particular crusade, which is that it's his wife, Shajar al Durr, who steps in and says, oh, yeah, my husband's alive. He's just in his bed. He's a bit ill, but he's issued these orders. And so she begins to hand out orders. She's working with some of the senior army commanders who know what's going on, but they keep the Sultan's death a secret. And she begins to issue orders in his name. And what she's trying to do is to hold things together because she knows that as soon as news gets out that Sultan is dead, that there'll be chaos unless and there is an heir in place. And so she sends out envoys pretty quickly to get Turan Shah south into Egypt to come and take charge of the situation.
- [43:20]
A
Yeah, because it's around about now that a figure emerges, Baybars, who will be a really key figure in the Mamluk faction. So who, who is Baybars? What do we know about him? How does he become quite so important?
- [43:35]
C
Yeah, Baibars began his career as, rather, as I said, really as an enslaved person taken captive on the its thoughts near the shores of the Black Sea, sold into slavery, he was sort of passed from one ruler to another for a while and ended up in service to the Ayyubids, like so many people. So Sultan Baobos will rise to become a major power. But at this point, the former Ayyubid Sultan's heir, Turan Shah, arrives, takes power for himself, and it seems as though things will continue much as they ever had. The Ayyubids are victorious. The Crusaders are defeated and surrendered. Louis is a prisoner of the Ayyubids. Everything's going the Ayyubid's way. But the new Sultan alienates the Mamluks. And the Mamluks feel as if they haven't received their due from the victory. And so now legend reports it was Baibos. But the Mamluks ultimately seize Turhan Shah and then murder him on the banks of the Nile. Now, immediately after that, there is the question of who's going to rule next. And essentially this is the process by which the Mamluks rise to power. And through a series of different rulers, they assert themselves as rulers of Egypt. In the early days, they normally set up an Ayyubid puppet so someone they can claim is the Ayyubid Sultan. But in fact, they're running Egypt themselves. But after a few years, they simply just assert themselves as Egypt's rulers, independent. So the Seventh Crusade is a catastrophe for the Crusaders. It is also a catastrophe for the Ayyubids. It is also the rise of a new empire that will survive until the early 16th century when it's conquered by the Ottomans, which is the rise of the Mamluk Empire.
- [45:41]
A
And one of the most crucial things we see during this early Mamluk period is kind of in around 1260, we see them come into conflict with the Mongols. And this seems to be a fairly seismic clash that could well have determined the direction, the rulership of this whole region for years to come. Because suddenly the unstoppable Mongols find someone who stops them.
- [46:04]
C
Yes. So of course, all these events with Louis Crusade are not taking place in a vacuum. Events are changing in the wider world. Not least the fact that Louis sent emissaries himself to go and negotiate with the Mongols. That doesn't really come to anything. The Mongols are moving forwards and huge numbers of displaced people are moving in front of them. So there is a new Great Khan called Monke. And Monka sends his brother Hulegu to the Middle east with the goal of. I suspect that the real goal was to conquer everything that's left, anything that's still independent. And there's not much. The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, which is basically Baghdad and a few surrounding towns, is still independent. The Crusader states are independent and the Mamluks are independent. So Hudegu sets off, and in 1256, he enters the Middle East. And soon after this, he advances on Baghdad. Now, Baghdad is one of the largest cities in the world at this time. And the Mongols surround the city, they lay siege, and then ultimately they conquer the city with enormous loss of life, an enormous massacre of the population, which of course, for the inhabitants and specifically for Sunni Islam and for the Abazid Caliphate, they. This is an enormous tragedy. This is a major disaster. Not to mention that the casualties will have been something in the region of six figures. So we're talking about a very, very significant and bloody event after this, the Mongols then head north into Syria and they conquer the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, which is an Ayyubid city. And then immediately after that, the Ayyubids in Damascus evacuate Damascus because they can see this isn't going to work. And ultimately, a Mongol flying column picks up the Ayyubid Sultan in Damascus. Of course, the Ayyubids in Syria, they're still. They survive Seventh Crusade. It's only Egypt that's conquered by the Mamluks, but the Mongols conquer what's left of them in 1260. So the only independent powers now are the Crusader states and the Mamluks in Egypt. And the Crusader states are very much veering towards allying with them or submitting to the Mongols.
- [48:52]
A
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- [50:26]
A
The Prince that Crusader states are in such a poor situation now that they must have been looking at the Mongols and thinking we can't resist these guys if they come, but maybe we could just point them at the Mamluks instead.
- [50:39]
C
Absolutely. The Mongols are unstoppable. Hulegue's army has been estimated at the lower end. Estimates put it at about 100,000 troops. On a good day, the Crusader states the Kingdom of Jerusalem can manage about 10,000. So there is going to be no stopping the Mongols by the Crusader states and the Principality of Antioch submits early to the Mongols, Kingdom of Jerusalem opens negotiations with the Mongols, doesn't quite submit, but it's sort of sound out what can be achieved there. And then the Mamluks do something rather unexpected and that is that more or less anyone anywhere in Eurasia under threat of invasion by the Mongols, if they've decided to fight and not to submit, what they will do generally is to prepare their defenses and wait to be attacked. But the Mamluks don't do that. They march out beyond Egypt and assertively seek combat with the Mongols, which is an incredibly gutsy thing to do. And they know by this stage that there's no alternative for them, because they made it very clear what they're going to do, because a short while before this, the Mongols sent envoys to the Mamluks and a Mamluks killed all but one of the envoys and shaved the beard from the third. There is no other way this is going to resolve now except on the battlefield. So the Mamluks march out with an army of around 12,000 against a Mongol force of 100,000 seeking battle. And we have reports of Mamluk commanders saying, why are we doing this? This isn't going to work. But, no, the Mamluk Sultan, who at this point is called Qutuz, he's determined he's going to do this. And the Mamluks reach out to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and say, do you want to fight with us? That's again, another example that the battle lines are rather more complicated in the Middle east, and they're often presented. And the Kingdom of Jerusalem hedges its bets. It doesn't want to fight the Mongols, so it doesn't want to fight with the Mamluks, but it provides food and sells horses to the Mamluks, I presume, so that in the unlikely event of a Mamluk victory, it can present itself as having been supportive. At the same time, in the case of a Mongol victory, it could say, well, we didn't help them. So there's a degree of sort of diplomacy going on there. But events work out very well for the Mamluks because the Great Khan Hulegu's brother Monka, dies. And so Hulegu unexpectedly withdraws with the greater part of his army eastwards because he wants to be involved in the political fallout from the Great Khan's death. And he only leaves a garrison in Syria to hold the territory. They've never been attacked. No one attacks the Mongols. The Mongols are attacking everyone. They are not attacked themselves, except they are, because the Mamluks are on the advance. And the Mamluks meet this garrison at a battle called Ain Jalut, which is a surprise victory for the Mamluks. And immediately after that, the Mamluks take Damascus and Aleppo, who are more than happy to hand themselves over to the Mamluks because they've been under Mongol rule. And so the Mamluks look like saviors to them. Suddenly, the Mongols have been defeated, but it's just a garrison. The main field army hasn't been defeated. And of course, as soon as Hulagu learns what's happened, he swears he's going to have his revenge as soon as he possibly can.
- [54:13]
A
I often wonder what would happen if the Mongols didn't have this situation where they withdraw everything and go back to the center when there's a succession going on, because it kind of brings to a halt Everything that they've managed to achieve up until then. And it's a, it feels like a slightly bizarre situation, but obviously the, the Mamluks here have absolutely exploited the fortune that they found in front of them and they've managed to beat the Mongols, which even if it's just a garrison, people don't do. Presumably this is a big propaganda victory for the Mamluks too. Are they then able to to assert themselves more widely in the region? What does this mean for the Crusader states now?
- [54:53]
C
So the main thing that helps the Mamluks is that in the years after Ayn Jalil though the Mongols have sworn revenge immediately. The Mongol Empire is in the process of breaking up into different sections ruled by different branches of the imperial family. And in the Middle East, Hulaguz territories that become known as the Ilkhanate. They are also claimed by a rival branch of the family which becomes known as the Carnet of the Golden Horde. Further north in sort of Russia, Eastern Europe, that sort of region. And they go to war. And it's a disastrous war fought across the Caucasus Mountains, which involves massive casualties for both sides. And that gives the Mamluks about 20 years with which to rebuild, to build themselves up, expand their trade, expand their army and fortify the Euphrates River. They even send out teams of burners to burn grassland to prevent the Mongol armies from grazing their horses there. But that 20 year period gives the Mamluks time to ready their defenses. So when the Mongols do ultimately re invade in 1281, no one's ready for a Mongol invasion, but they're as ready as they can be. And that means there's another big battle fought. And one historian says that the Mongol battle line was 26 km wide. This is vast scale war making. But the Mamluks defeat them again. And in many ways this is a more significant battle than Aym Jalut because they're meeting the Mongols at full strength. And despite the disparity in numbers, the Mamluks defeat them. The Mongols are put to flight again. And the Mongols won't return in force to that theater of war for another 18 years. And it's a crucial point that in those gaps so between Ayn jalut and Homs, 21 years, Homs and the Mongols return in 1299, 18 years. The Mamluks spend those intervening years taking apart the Crusader states. And this doesn't take place in some kind of epic showdown or massive battle. There's hardly any battles at all because the Crusader states realize that they are vastly outnumbered by the Mamluks. And so, town by town, city by city, stronghold by stronghold, the Mamluks take the Crusader states apart in a series of campaigns that ultimately sees the collapse of the mainland Crusader states in 1291.
- [57:20]
A
And it's interesting, isn't it, that after almost 200 years of the Crusader states being there and of Christians having a presence in the near east and these fluctuating periods of conflict and crusades, that it's not some seismic battle that ends it all. It's a slow dismantling of what the Christians had and them being forced out. And we don't see, again, we don't see at this point a big crusading zeal in Europe. Do we have the European Christians simply lost their interest? Do they not believe it's winnable anymore? Do they not see the urgency that was there 200 years earlier to go and reclaim Jerusalem?
- [57:59]
C
Yeah, so there's a number of factors. There are a lot of calls for a major crusade, particularly in the 1270s under the pontificate of Gregory X, but it doesn't really happen. Gregory X dies at a crucial moment, which causes those plans to collapse. But there's also a lot of other wars going on in Western Europe. People are preoccupied with other major conflicts. There's a conflict over Sicily. England's fighting various civil wars. There's wars elsewhere. It's just not a propitious environment in which to create a new crusade. And indeed, there'll be no big crusade, really, to the Middle East. Despite major calls for crusades, the next really big army to set off for the Middle east is over 100 years later in 1396. So it never really happens. And it's that ongoing infighting and the internal sort of disputes of Western Christendom's leaders that play a major part in that.
- [59:02]
A
Yeah, I just find it so fascinating that it all begins in this big explosion of the First Crusade. And in the end, 200 years later, it's effectively really just a petering out. It kind of just, I don't know, crumbles is picked apart by the. The Mamluks, but crumbles and goes away. And there simply isn't any more Crusader states and no more Christian crusading in the Holy Land. Really. It's a weird kind of. From all of that early activity and what the Christians must have believed was a promise that they were going to hold the Holy Land for Christianity, they've just sort of given up 200 years later, and they Realize they either can't do it or there just isn't the will to do it at all.
- [59:43]
C
The world's very much changing. There's no shortage of armchair strategists. In fact, there's a real sort of. There's a whole genre of texts that are created after 1291, where people write, if we raised an army here, we marched it there, and they did this, then it could be the Crusader States could be reconstructed. There's lots of that kind of thinking. But, no, there's no major crusade. And of course, in the 14th century, there are other things that will make it even more difficult. Things like the Great Famine early on, later on, the Black Death, among other things. Not to mention the ongoing persistent churn of conflicts. The Hundred Years War kicks off between England and France, and it becomes adverse weather for crusading in that area. There's quite a lot of enthusiasm for it, but it never really takes off after that. No major crusade reaches the actual Holy Land region again.
- [60:35]
A
So thank you very much, Nick. And if people want to find out more, where can they find some of your work?
- [60:40]
C
Okay. Yes. So I've written a book about this whole era of history called the Mongol Storm, which is basically a history of the Middle east in the 13th century, told from about 10 different cultural perspectives, if you're interested. I've also just finished another book which is coming out in June, called the Crusader Storm, which does a similar job for the 12th century. So it's a history of the Crusades in the Middle east in the 12th century, again, told from around 10 different cultural perspectives, trying to give a rounded view to events and trying to show how the Crusades fitted in and amongst everything else that's going on in this era.
- [61:19]
A
Brilliant.
- [61:19]
C
Well, that's something to look forward to.
- [61:20]
A
Mongolstorm is absolutely incredible. So I'm very much looking forward to the Crusader Storm to accompany it. Now, listeners, don't go away. This episode isn't quite finished. We've charted the steady decline of the Crusader states in the face of terrifying Mongol incursions and a rampant Mamluk empire. But crusading didn't stop there. In 1291, with the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, its effects were felt all across the medieval world and beyond for centuries to come, whilst its legacies remain contested to this very day. So to end this epic series, explore what we've learned, and unpack what the Crusades left behind, I'm delighted to be joined by Elena. Hi, Elena.
- [62:02]
B
Hello, Matt. Thanks for having me.
- [62:05]
A
You are always welcome. So I Guess if we're going to think about the legacies of Crusade.
- [62:10]
B
So, like, I think what we can say there is that all winds right down in about 1291, I think. Would that be fair, do you think?
- [62:19]
A
I think, I mean, we've, we've got kind of the eight numbered Crusades. We need to throw in all the other bits and pieces that are going on in the mix with all of that. But kind of by 1291, there isn't an army that, that physically goes. But that's different to the desire of particularly the papacy. We see them continue to preach crusades for centuries after 1291. You know, for, for the whole of the 14th century. They would love a crusade to head to the Holy Land again. But it just becomes more and more difficult to make that happen for a number of reasons. You can't help wondering in amongst the many, many reasons is the fact that it patently doesn't work.
- [62:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing is like, there's a real like, fool me twice, shame on you sort of thing happened.
- [63:03]
A
Fool me eight times.
- [63:05]
C
Eight times. Wow.
- [63:06]
B
I really should have learned something by now. And this is the thing is people do, right? People do. And eventually you are going to figure out that it doesn't seem like God is as committed to this as, as I am, you know, in my heart. And also, you know, really, what's in it for the kings in question? Because we've already seen how difficult it is to hold any land over there. So it's just going to be a time suck, a money suck, especially by the time you get to the 14th century, like babes, I can't even feed my own people. How am I ever going to get over to the Holy Land? Then you have the Black Death. And how are you ever going to come up with enough people to move over there? It's like we are barely keeping the farms going right now. So there are going to be a lot of social pressures on this concept as well. But, you know, as you say, yeah, it turns out these guys are kind of smart.
- [63:56]
A
We thought when we talked about the causes of the Crusades, a bit about the climatic factors that are going on, the medieval war period, we get to the end of the 13th century, that's also ending and we're moving towards the Little Ice Age. So We've got the 14th century of catastrophes that you talked about, the great famine, the Black Death. But also there isn't that sense of comfort and abundance in Europe that there once was, which helped to feed the Crusade. So for the crusading movement, some of its. Some of its fodder has gone. The things that it's been living off for a couple of centuries are starting to vanish.
- [64:26]
B
And I think one of the big things that's starting to vanish as well at this point in time are these specific crusading orders. I think this is an important point to get at, because trouble with, you know, attempting to maintain the Holy Land is, wow, these guys got real rich, huh? And that is something that kings take note of and they exploit. Right. Like, this is one of the big things. Like, it's one thing if you are Richard the First and you can say, well, how do you maintain things like that when there's like the Templars going, hello, we're the Templars. And everyone can say, oh, well, I'm just giving money to the Templars right now. Like, why would I. Why would I give it to the king? Right. But then also that introduces, I think, kings eyeing people like the Templars up. When you have these incredibly wealthy groups of individuals who, again, aren't even really able to do their job. Right.
- [65:22]
A
They've been spectacularly successful. They've created what we would probably call today a multinational company. You know, they're almost like a medieval Amazon. They are everywhere and they will deliver to your door if you give them money for it. They are creating banking systems across Western Europe. They are controlling money and the movement of funds. They are in the ear of monarchs and nobles across Europe in a way that the Templar Order was never designed to be. And as you say, people are looking at them. And I think people like Philip IV in France, he wants their money.
- [65:55]
B
And this is the thing. They've been pushed out of the Holy Land. Here they are like in Cyprus. Here they are kind of like, like, of falling back into Tripoli further and further again. And is it true that they aren't really doing the thing that they want? Yes, but it's also true that then if you are, Philip, and you start eyeing them up and you take everything away from them, then you're not going to be able to count on their largess on their supply lines later on if you decide to go over to the homeland.
- [66:28]
A
Yeah. And I think their kind of failure and their fall is in pretty stark contrast to the way that the hospital has managed to come out of the. The crusading era, because they don't necessarily go down that route of becoming this banking group. They're not this multinational corporation that are in European countries getting involved in politics and stuff. There they managed to position themselves much more as almost a frontier of. Of Christendom. And that seems to serve them that they're saying, we will hold this line.
- [66:56]
C
Mm.
- [66:56]
B
And I think that that is really canny. Right. Because if what we're saying is, yeah, sorry, lads, looks like the Holy Land's a bit of a non starter. What you can do is at least say, well, we are the line, right? We are the wall that is holding back the theoretical hordes of Gog and
- [67:13]
A
Magog, right, where the Templars are falling back to Cyprus, the hospitals are falling back to Rhodes until they get pushed out of there by the ottomans in the 16th century. And then they'll fall back to Malta and, you know, they'll be on Malta till Napoleon gets rid of them at the. The end of the 18th century, which
- [67:28]
B
is God bless them. It's a good run. It's a good run.
- [67:31]
A
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- [69:04]
A
But they seem to manage to do what the Templars couldn't do. Whether the Templars have got overconfident, forgotten what they're about, I don't know. But like I say, I think the hospitals do this really interesting thing of saying, we will maintain this front line and just leave us alone.
- [69:19]
B
Yeah, but I mean, speaking of this front line that they are maintaining, big part of what they're arguing they're maintaining is a line against our good friends the Ottomans. And it is True that at this point in time, you know, we've had the Seljuk Turks before. This is like too, too Turk, too furious. We got Ottomans now and they will go on to be like the major power in Asia Minor for quite some time.
- [69:45]
A
And it's quite striking how close that mirrors the events leading up to the first Crusade in that you've got this sudden Turk threat on the, the edges of Christendom that forces them to become mobilized. You know, it's not Alexios appealing from Byzantium anymore, but it's that same sort of notion. And at the end of the, the 14th century, 100 years after we've said we think crusading has really ended, There is what, 15,000 men who march out to try and fight against the Ottomans. They don't do a very good job of that. It does not go well.
- [70:18]
B
No.
- [70:19]
A
And yet for some reason it's not called a crusade. It's not numbered as a crusade. We don't think of it as a continuation of the crusading period. I don't know whether at this point are we much more openly acknowledging that this is far more to do with land and territory than it is to do with religion?
- [70:34]
B
I think that is a big part of it. Right, because it's not as though we aren't going to see a bunch of crusades happening at the same time that are largely European, you know, because listen, go ask the Teutonic Knights what they're doing up in the Baltic right now and they'll say, oh, that's a crusade.
- [70:52]
A
And you can still see, I think, the Roman Church in its arrogance and its conviction of its own superiority and correctness, you know, when Tamerlane emerges to try and rebuild the Mongol Empire, he stops the Ottomans in their tracks. And it looks for a little while like the Mongols are back in a Genghis Khan kind of way.
- [71:10]
B
Oh yeah.
- [71:11]
A
And what does Rome do? They preach a crusade against Tamerlan, which good luck.
- [71:16]
B
I mean like, I swear to God, like, yeah, hearing all the stories about like the piles of skulls as thrones and they're like, yeah, guys, I think that we really stand a chance. It should be absolutely fine.
- [71:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you do still see crusading rhetoric, you know, carrying on into the early modern period because the Ottomans are now on the borders of the Habsburgs lands. But again, crusading rhetoric is used. People are willing to pull it out of the drawer when they want money because crusado, big crusading tax, give us loads of money and we'll go and fight the Ottomans who are about to breach our borders and head into your lands. But it never ever works, still does it? And again, are we stuck with this idea that this is no longer about, this isn't Rome, this isn't Western Christendom's. Over in France, worried about what's happening thousands of miles away. We're seeing Habsburgs being concerned that their Ottoman neighbors might be about to take their land. And everybody is thinking, I know what you're doing.
- [72:15]
C
Well.
- [72:16]
B
And of course they do. Right. When you said, you said it yourself like, these French people aren't like, oh, what's going on thousands of miles away? French people are like, haha, stick it to the Habsburgs. I mean, Francis the First of France is one of the first to be like, no, I'm in it with them. Right, right. Which would be unthinkable.
- [72:31]
A
Let's say if you went back a few hundred years and you explained that France would side with the Ottoman Turks against the rest of Western Christendom and Eastern Christendom, people would be utterly bemused. Would France have even existed? Would they have allowed France as a country to exist if it had been doing that? It's a bizarre situation that completely undermines the idea that any of this is crusading because you've got the most Christian king. So we've been talking about Western Christian efforts to retake the near east, the Holy Land, the Eastern Mediterranean. And even if all of that ends in 1291, then crusading elsewhere, the idea of fighting people whose religious beliefs aren't the same as yours in principle does continue in other places.
- [73:17]
C
Yeah.
- [73:17]
B
I mean, I think probably first off the top of our heads, we could talk about what's going on on the Iberian Peninsula, for example. And granted, you know, we've done innumerable episodes about what is going on, you know, with El Cid and situations like this, it's not clear cut. It's not like, oh, it's Christians versus Muslims, it's Muslims versus Christian. Who knows who's controlling Astorias at any given moment, who's controlling Granada, who's to say? Right. But we do eventually have the situation by the time we get to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, where fundamentally the last Muslim kingdoms are destroyed. Was there a bunch of back and forth? Yes. And now we often call this the Reconquista. I don't like to call it the Reconquista because Franco came up with that and I don't like fascists. But fundamentally this is kind of a situation Wherein Christians did eventually say, look, I don't need to go all the way. Like, you know, it's that old joke, you know, we've got Muslims at home, you know, like, we're not going all the way to the Middle east in order to fight them. We can do it right here, you know, and this does culminate in a pretty big success on Ferdinand and Isabella's part. Do I think that they were bad people? Yes. Do I like the Spanish Inquisition? No. But it is like one of those big. That's an early modern success story, baby. Like, you know, you create a huge kingdom out of what had been 10 medieval kingdoms before, and you say, and now also, because we control it, we can also enforce what the religion is. Imagine telling a medieval person, oh, yeah, yeah, there's only one, one state on the Iberian Peninsula, and also they control what the religion is. You know, people would be shocked by that in the medieval period. The idea that such a huge amount of land could be under control of one dynasty and that you could actually get rid of all of the Jewish and Muslim people, it just wouldn't commute.
- [75:16]
A
Yeah. And the, the Iberian Peninsula is something that, you know, the Umayyads arrive in the south of Iberia in the, the 8th century, pretty successful there for a couple of centuries till they begin to fall apart. And again, it's kind of this fracturing of the internal Muslim world that begins to allow the Christians back in. And so it also overlaps the end of what we've defined as a crusading period in the terms of the near east by a couple of centuries. And I think it is interesting that we see popes being aware of that and quite often trying to stop everybody going to the Holy Land, because there is also a fight to be had over here. So popes are willing to say, if you can't go to the Holy Land, here's, you know, a shortcut alternative. You know, you can use Santiago de Compostela as Jerusalem kind of thing. Because I think they're conscious that if you evacuate every night from western Christendom and off the Iberian Peninsula, there is another frontier there that they're having to deal with. And it's significant. I think that begins a couple of centuries before the crusading era, and it lasts a couple of centuries longer than the crusading era. It's a much more long term effort and maybe more of an existential threat because this is on what is considered European territory than the Crusades, which almost makes it odd that popes are willing to look east rather than focusing all of their efforts here first. In crusading terms, it's a success story from a Christian point of view. Iberia is a success story in the way that the near east never, ever is. And in some ways, the success there kind of spawns this early modern continuation of crusading ideals when we get to the age of exploration. Because you think of people like Columbus and Cortez going out there, part of what they're obsessed with doing is Christianizing everybody that they meet.
- [77:01]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And that is specifically something that they are charged with doing. So we have to remember that, you know, this kind of push out west, out across the oceans, the push down into Africa, the beginnings of this push for the wholesale chattel slavery of Africans. It is all driven by this idea of Christianizing. They don't say that there are no worlds left to conquer. They just say, oh, well, we did it here. Where are we going to go to next? How far do I need to go in a boat in order to continue doing a version of holy war, a version of violence against people in order to Christianize them? And the papacy is very clear in the early modern period about all of this. These are things that are completely acceptable under the doctrines of holy war. And that is something that I think medieval Christians would recognize a little bit more, even if they would be kind of confused by the idea of this being a crusade, I think.
- [77:59]
A
Yeah. And you do see Columbus in particular, you know, some of the letters that he's writing, he's talking about all of the wealth that I'm finding plow that into an effort to go back and take Jerusalem. So that dream still hasn't gone. And to some extent, you wonder whether that's, again, flush with success. On the Iberian Peninsula, they're believing we could spearhead a new crusade. So the idea of taking back Jerusalem for Christianity hasn't gone away. And Columbus is perhaps envisaging these explorations to the New world and the gold and the silver that he's finding and everything else specifically, as a way to get Jerusalem back. It's still. That is still a dream, even if it never leads to a numbered crusade that will actually assault Jerusalem.
- [78:42]
B
And certainly it is going to be, at the very least, a romantic gesture, I think, across the period. I mean, can we talk a little bit about the Baltic Crusades?
- [78:55]
A
How can we not talk about the Baltic Crusades?
- [78:57]
C
I love a little.
- [78:58]
A
Because we're going to get another crusading order up there. So the Teutonic knights, again, much as we Talked about the Hospitallers, they far outlive the crusading period in the way that the Templars don't manage to do. And that seems to be largely because they extricate themselves from the Holy Land completely. Where the Hospitallers are saying, we will be the frontier of Christendom in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Teutonic Knights seem much happier to say, and we'll be the frontier up in the far northeast because there's some pagans still here and we can keep them at bay. And also, you know, we'll, we'll push in and we'll Christianize them. And by the way, we might create a Teutonic state and get a kingdom out of all of this as well.
- [79:36]
C
But.
- [79:36]
A
But we're going to Christianize them.
- [79:38]
C
Yeah.
- [79:38]
B
So this is an interesting one because if we say that the Knights Templar are essentially a corporation or, wow, the Teutonic Knights, like, they are doing it big, you know, down to the fact that all of their castles look the same and are made out of bricks. Like they have franchises. Right. This is like the McDonald's of the crusading order. You know, you see one, you know what it looks like? Yep, those are Teutonic Knights and they are inching their way up into the Baltic States. And listen, there is a lot of money to be made up there. Really, really good fur trappings. And yeah, to be fair, if, like, what holy war is for is Christianizing people. But these are not even people of the book. These are not even Abrahamic people. They're out here worshiping fire. They're out here worshiping a snake. I don't know which, to be fair, I think is insanely cool. And I think that there should be more fire worship. It's a shame that they actually got their weight, but they're, they're making some good points. Right. This really does count as a group of people who are honest to God pagans.
- [80:40]
A
And you can see in the early 13th century that popes are backing and sanctioning what is going on up there. And they're encouraging people to go against the, the pagan barbarians in the Baltics. As the crusading effort in the near east is faltering and becoming really problematic because they're clearly recognizing that what the Teutonic Knights are giving us up there is a bit of a success story in amongst the mess that's happening in the Near East. And you get the Baltic Crusades and around, the Teutonic Knights become a bit of a magnet for people who, who don't make it to the Holy Land. So Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, goes and cuts his teeth fighting with the Teutonic Knights. You know, he goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he's not there in a military capacity. He does his fighting and he earns a reputation for himself up in the Baltics with the Teutonic Knights. And so presumably he's bringing back to England stories of this frontier. But the glorious work that is being done there, that only fuels this idea that it needs to come continue fundamentally.
- [81:38]
B
Like, what if you're just not a hot weather person, right? Like, what if, what if you want to go on a holy war? It's a lot nearer by. You don't have to go and be getting sunstroke all the time. That is a frontier that exists that you can go involve yourself with.
- [81:56]
A
And ultimately the, the Teutonic Knights kind of, by the 16th century almost become a victim of their own success in that they have Christianized all the pagans that are left there and are just running a kingdom now. And they look an awful lot like a secular power. And other secular powers around them are thinking, hang on, that land could be mine.
- [82:16]
B
Wait a minute, how do you do this?
- [82:19]
A
Where did you come from?
- [82:19]
B
And I mean that they will be a victim of their own success in that way, you know, where it's like, well, what is the point of view, right? It's the same thing that happens to the Knights Templar when you run out of pagans, when eventually we do have this decline in, you know, the Baltic states of the old pagan religions, and suddenly you've just got all of these brick castles around.
- [82:40]
A
What's the point of that? You know, And I think as the medieval period goes on as well, one of the, maybe the most insidious developments and the one that Urban might actually frown on the most is this idea of having crusades against other Christians within Europe.
- [82:56]
B
So we have, arguably, one of our worst popes is fronting this up, and that is Innocent iii. And now listen, medieval historians, we go back and forth on this because on the one hand, Innocent iii, he is responsible for this huge transformation of the Church into a legal structure. But what does he do in order to celebrate? He goes and points that legal structure at the wrong kind of Christians, which in this case are the good men and women of Languedoc, right? They use, the Church, uses the term Cathar, and in particular Bernard of Clairvaux, who goes out there to do some light Inquisition work, calls them the Cathars. They never call Themselves that they're just like, I don't know, I'm just a cool guy, right. And what ends up happening is that they just find a bunch of people who are kind of like chilling out in the south of France and, and they've just got, you know, their own ideas about how things look. And that can mean, yes, that they perhaps believe in a dualistic idea of the universe. So there's this idea that the physical world is created by Satan. God's only created the spiritual. There are no doubt some people who believe in that at the time. There are also people like Beatrice of Plainsoul, who appears to have wanted to shag a bit and so starts calling herself a heretic. Because that's what all the guys who are hitting on her say that she should do if she wants to do that, right. So it's a real mixed bag of people. And the church goes in and absolutely massacres them.
- [84:25]
A
We had a really interesting episode of Gone Medieval probably a couple of years ago now. We talked to Mark Gregory Pegg about the idea that Cathars didn't even exist, that there weren't these heretics that were lurking in the caves of the Languedoc and holding themselves up in of front fortresses, that this was never really a religious crusade, what this was a land grab. Because the area that, that used to be Aquitaine, around the Long Dock was still kind of considered itself far too independent, was still bucking against the control from Paris that the French kings wanted. The Pope is so in the pocket of the French kings by this point, French popes and French kings thinking we want to unify France, what's the best way to reduce these people and force them to behave? We call them heretics and we call a crusade against them. But that maybe there was never any religious justification to that. What this was, was a political maneuver to solidify the state of France.
- [85:19]
B
And, you know, indeed, if you look at who's leading it, right, because here we've got Simon de Montfort, right, and he is casting his eyes around and he is noticing Raymond of Toulouse's territory. And it's looking pretty good. It's looking pretty good. Let's be so honest and for real about that.
- [85:35]
A
And he's like, Toulouse has always been a tricky one, I think, because it controls those access over the Alps to Italy, really important trade route and access to the coast. All these kinds of things that are politically important but actually have nothing to do with religion.
- [85:46]
B
Exactly. And you know, who doesn't want to control that? Oh, come on. South of France. Right. Like, I'm trying to take it over right now. That's absolutely fine. Right. And he's got this in because what we're already saying, oh, gosh, wow, it really looks like these guys are spawn of the devil. So, you know, off he pops and he essentially just annexes this entire territory. By 12:15, he's got the crown of Toulouse, essentially. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, this is an incredible amount of territory to suddenly take over about a four year period. And it's massively wealthy. You know, things just grow down in the south of France. Like, you know, your peasants are living real good and nice to the point that you can terrorize a bunch of them, massacre them all, and there's still going to be enough people to bring the harvest in. And essentially that's what Simon is able
- [86:36]
A
to do here, because Simon is swearing fealty to the King of France for this territory that he's now taken. And the French King is thinking, right, job done, that's under my control. And they've kind of boxed it up and put a bow on it and called it a crusade. It's an interesting legacy that, that people are still processing things in terms of crusading, that we can position this as a way to do it, or I need to emulate these things. And if there isn't a crusade in town, I'm gonna have to find something and call it a crusade or try and make it a crusade.
- [87:07]
B
Oh yeah, and listen, there's gonna be a few of those. Right? So, for example, the papacy is constantly doing it against our homeboy, Frederick ii and all of his, you know, descendants as well. And there are good reasons for this. I mean, they are controlling a lot of territory around the Papal States. The Papal States don't love being sandwiched between the Holy Roman Empire and some more Holy Roman Empire. That's usually not something that they have to deal with. And so basically, any time One of Frederick VII's grandsons gets a little out of control, they're like, oh, that's crazy. Guess what, it's a crusade. Especially after the success with the Albigensian Crusade, you know.
- [87:50]
A
Yeah. And we talked a bit when we thought about the causes of the Crusade, about this idea of the Church wanting to reposition itself and refocus its secular authority. And you can almost still see that happening. They're still in this dispute with the Holy Roman Emperors about who is the real secular power. And that fight is still going on and the Church is still willing to frame that as a crusade, even though you're now talking. Talking about the Holy Roman Emperor, you know, the Christian emperor of the former Roman Empire. We can have a crusade against him now because he's. And it's almost like it's. It's become an overused tool for popes to say, I don't like you, Crusade.
- [88:31]
B
Like, grow up, bro. Like, that is. That is not. That is not a reason to call a crusade. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
- [88:37]
A
Like, you're just throwing that term around now.
- [88:38]
B
Yeah, it's just like.
- [88:39]
C
Yeah.
- [88:39]
B
Just because you. You want to do it, you can't just say that it's a crusade. Right.
- [88:43]
A
And I think another aspect of maybe the legacies of the Crusade that we should think about is the formation of some of the institutions and the structures that will become Western states that are recognizable to us today. You know, you think of Richard the Lionheart, famously didn't care about England, just used it to raise money. But there's a reason that he's able to do that, because the structures are being created to allow something like the Saladin tithe to be put in place. He has the administration that can go out and collect a tenth of what everybody has. And that's important because he needs it for the Crusades. Louis ix, when he doesn't do very well, but he understands his failure in terms of his own sin and the sin of his kingdom. So he comes home with this reforming zeal to redesign and restructure France, to drive out corruption and to create this much more so centralized state. So almost the legacy of the Crusades is the institutionalization, the increased centralization of authority in states that will become what we recognize in Europe today. England, France, Germany.
- [89:49]
B
I mean, I would also say Venice, for me, Venice is like one of the real legacies of the Crusade and the fact that they are able to get enough money and power together that they. They have their own empire. Right. And that is pretty much down to the Crusades and the fact that everyone is specifically going through Venice. They're looking to Venice to build ships for them. They are looking to Venice to provide instruments of credit, which is one of the only ways kind of around the idea that you shouldn't be charging interest. Venice is like, ah, but what? Oh, but I'm just a little guy with a ship. And the church is like, oh, yeah, what's it for? Oh, it's for the Crusades. Okay, yeah, fine, fine, I guess that you are allowed to charge interest. And so this really is going to set them up as an incredible power into, well into the early modern period. And, you know, also I would argue to a certain extent that is the model that the Templars are using a bit is this Venetian thing like, how are you getting to and from places? You're going to need a banking system that is to going. Going to lend you credit. You are going to need to think about how your travel plans work. So I think certainly the Templars are a really important part of the Crusades. I don't necessarily mean as crusaders, but I mean as an institution within Europe.
- [91:12]
A
And I guess one of the other places we need to think about the legacy of the Crusades is what was Byzantium. The First Crusade is kicked off in no small part because the Byzantine Empire calls for help from other Western Christians and they very cynically never deliver that. They go off and do something very different. We've seen the Fourth Crusade sack Constantinople. And ultimately, I wonder, does the crusading period weaken the Byzantine Empire by failing to support it? Does it weaken it sufficiently that the Ottomans are then able to take it?
- [91:46]
B
I would say yes. Thank you. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah. I mean, I think that you're really onto something, something here because ultimately, what is Byzantium for if it isn't actually, you know, one of the big hallmarks of Christendom, if it isn't this important outpost of Romanness and Christianity, if not even other Christians respect that, then that takes away a lot of the shine and it lessens their ability to argue for themselves. Themselves, I think, as a polity.
- [92:19]
A
Yeah, because they're concerned about fighting on their eastern front and initially the Seljuk Turks, but then they will also face threats from a more cohesive Muslim presence in the near east. And then the Mongols will arrive as well. But they don't only have to worry about that on their eastern front because not only are they not getting the support they really want from Western Christendom, but Western Christendom is actually eyeing them. You know, who breaches the walls of Constantinople that are unbreachable? It's Western Christians. It is not a Muslim army that gets through those walls, it's Latin Christians.
- [92:54]
B
I think that one of the big things that does happen with Latin Christians, if what we're thinking about is the legacy of Crusades, is they do become a bit more aware of what is going on certainly in Central Asia. You know, suddenly Mongols are not just like a theoretical something that is happening out near India. Right. And granted, that's because some of Them show up in Hungary, etc. But you know, also it's the, this idea that there can be these diplomacies. There is this idea of, oh, there are knock on effects when Mongols move around, then other people move around. Oh, what's a Mamluk? You know, these become things that people are really aware of in Europe. And so you do get an interesting interplay of cultural exchange as a result of that.
- [93:37]
A
Yeah. And I think cultural exchange is one of the things that is quite, quite tricky for us to pin down in terms of is this a legacy of crusading or is this something that would have happened anyway as people come into contact with each other more increasingly? Because what we do see initially after the first contact of crusading armies in the Holy Land is this what Christians will call the rediscovery of things that Muslims knew were never lost. This idea that there's all these books and this, this ancient Roman and Greek philosophy and learning that begins to plow back into Europe and is being translated into Latin. And this idea of a Renaissance period in Europe then being fueled by the crusading. And I guess it's hard, it definitely has an impact. But is that just because of crusading or would that have happened anyway as trade happened and as people just lived next to each other for long enough, maybe it happens faster. Maybe the Crusades cause it to happen in a smash rather than a smooth process. But there is nevertheless this big cultural exchange that goes on during this period. And I guess before we finish, you know, do we want to think about the modern legacies of crusading as it exists in the, the world today, which, let's be frank, can be a tricky conversation to have. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it.
- [94:55]
B
Yeah. Like, do I want to think about it? No. Am I forced to every day? Yes. Because I think, you know, especially in kind of like the 19th century and the early 20th century in particular, there comes about this really kind of silly and simplistic way of talking about the Crusades, which is there's the whole clash of civilizations thing, you know, this idea that, oh, the Muslims and Christians have always been at war with each other. Look at the Crusades. And it's like, baby, what do you mean by Christian? What do you mean by Muslim? What does any of this mean? Right, it's. And that is extrapolated from, especially when we see things like, you know, the friction between, for example. Yeah, again, the Ottoman Turks and US in World War I, you know, whatever has happened more recently in The Muslim world, you know, with like, the rise of Wahhabism and these ideals of more pointed cultural friction, I suppose. But you really can't look at the medieval Crusades in any honesty and think that that is true. Like, honestly.
- [96:04]
A
No. I think this revival that happens in the 19th century, it's no coincidence that it happens around the same time as imperialism. And we've talked a lot about how crusading can be repurposed for political and territorial gain. And I think that's what's happening in the 19th century. People are positioning things as crusades that aren't. And I think it's interesting that right up to the modern day, you think there's examples all the way through the 20th century of things that are framed as a crusade. Was the Second World War a crusade against Nazism? It becomes a word that is used to describe any struggle against something that you consider to be bad. You know, governments have a crusade to build housing. Is that a crusade?
- [96:42]
B
Listen, I think that I'm going to steal your point because I've heard you say this, and I think it's such a good one. You know what, when you use the word crusade, it is essentially interchangeable with the word jihad. And would you go around throwing that around in the same way? Just a question.
- [96:59]
A
I mean, a jihad has several meanings as well, that crusade simply doesn't. It can be about the internal struggle for a Muslim to be a better Muslim, as well as the external one. And that external one can be divided into a political approach and a military approach. But we tend to think of the word jihad meaning the Islamic military efforts against other religions. And it's almost like we use crusading to be a good thing, but we never use the word jihad to mean a good thing. And I think. I think a lot of particularly Western Christian people associate jihad with being a bad thing.
- [97:35]
B
Listen, ask any of the Christians who are living in Antioch during the siege. How they feel about crusaders is all I would say, you know.
- [97:45]
A
Well, I think this has been a fairly fascinating exploration of some of the legacies of crusade, which are. I mean, that they're immediate, but they're also persistent. They exist into today, don't they? We've seen so many different ways in which crusading and the crusading attitudes have shaped huge parts of the world right up until today.
- [98:04]
B
Absolutely. I don't think that there is any way to understand our way world without understanding the Crusades as a whole. It's just that there's so much to see there. I don't know if we'll ever really get to the bottom of it, which is why we can continue having fun conversations like this.
- [98:21]
C
Wow.
- [98:22]
A
We made it. Our odyssey through the history of the Crusades has come to an end. From the fields of Claremont in 1095 to the ruins of Acre in 1291, we've traced nearly two centuries of of faith, ambition, slaughter and catastrophe. We've seen how a movement born of pilgrimage, piety and papal reform exploded into the First Crusade. How fragile Crusader kingdoms were carved out and contested by kings, queens and sultans. How crusading unraveled before the walls of Constantinople. And how, in the end, forces far beyond Western Europe Europe swept the Crusader states from the Eastern Mediterranean altogether. If there's one thing this journey has shown us, it's that the Crusades were never simply a clash of civilizations pitting Muslims against Christians. They were a tangled web of politics, a diplomatic chess game, a commercial opportunity, and a medieval epic that reshaped Europe and the wider world in ways that lasted far back beyond the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Thank you so much for listening and joining us on this ride. And thanks to Dr. Nicholas Morton again for joining me earlier in this episode. If you want to find out more, then do go and pre order his new book, the Crusader A Global History of the wars for the Middle East. And if this series has whetted your appetite height, you can dive back into our back catalogue where we've explored everything from the Albigensian Crusade to the campaigns of the Teutonic Knights and the rise of Saladin. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please come back and join Elena and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with the new release every week. Head over to historyhit.com subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history.
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