Explaining the Crusades

Summary

History 102: Explaining the Crusades

Episode Title: Explaining the Crusades
Release Date: July 14, 2025
Hosts: Rudyard Lynch (WhatifAltHist) and Austin Padgett
Publisher: Turpentine Podcast Network

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Introduction

In this comprehensive episode of History 102, hosts Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve deep into the multifaceted history of the Crusades. They explore the socio-political and economic underpinnings that led to these pivotal events, analyze their profound impacts on both the Western and Islamic worlds, and draw connections to broader patterns in the rise and fall of civilizations.

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The Genesis of the Crusades

Rudyard Lynch ([00:47] – [06:10]):
Rudyard sets the stage by framing the Crusades as a "prime white people moment." He defines this term as periods when Western societies, driven by internal pressures and desires to project power, engage in large-scale, often aggressive endeavors. The Crusades, occurring during the High Middle Ages, marked Europe’s first significant outward expansion, transitioning from a continent recovering from the Dark Ages to a formidable force engaging the broader world.

“I consider the Crusades to be a prime white people moment...where when your society is bored and you just do something excessively based just to let off steam.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [04:22]

Rudyard emphasizes the internal consolidation of Europe post-9th century, highlighting the formation of feudal structures as a response to constant invasions from the Magyars, Vikings, and Arabs. This consolidation underpinned the organizational capacity required to launch the Crusades.

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Byzantine Struggles and the Rise of the Seljuks

Rudyard Lynch ([07:14] – [16:30]):
The decline of the Byzantine Empire was a critical catalyst for the Crusades. Rudyard discusses the Battle of Manzikert ([07:42]), where the Seljuk Turks decisively defeated the Byzantine forces, leading to the loss of Anatolia. This military setback not only weakened Byzantium but also exposed Europe to the urgent need for assistance, prompting the Byzantine Emperor to seek aid from the Western Church.

“The Battle of Manzikert...the Byzantine army was slaughtered by the Seljuks.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [07:42]

The collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate ([15:00]) and the rise of slave soldier dynasties like the Seljuks and Mamluks created a fragmented Islamic world. These dynasties, reliant on slave soldiers for military might, maintained tight control over their territories but also sowed seeds of internal instability and oppression.

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Papal Initiative and the Call to Crusade

Rudyard Lynch ([16:30] – [32:28]):
Responding to the Byzantine plea, the Pope orchestrated the First Crusade. Rudyard outlines how Pope Urban II ([25:33]) leveraged religious fervor and the promise of absolution to mobilize European nobility and knights. This strategic redirection of martial energies aimed to unify Europe under a common religious and military goal, fostering the early formation of centralized European states.

“The Pope was thinking, how do I...redirect these masculine warrior energies towards our external opponents?”
— Rudyard Lynch, [25:36]

The logistical and economic demands of the Crusades ([29:29] – [35:00]) necessitated advancements in European governance and financial systems, inadvertently paving the way for the rise of capitalism and the commercial revolution. The integration of the Mediterranean trade routes, primarily facilitated by Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa, was a direct outcome of the Crusader endeavors.

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Crusader Strategies and Islamic Responses

Rudyard Lynch ([35:02] – [78:33]):
Rudyard delves into the military tactics employed by both Crusaders and their Islamic adversaries. The Crusaders' heavy cavalry and direct combat approach often clashed with the more mobile and tactical horse archer strategies of the Seljuks and later the Mamluks. Key battles, such as the Battle of Hattin ([57:52] – [63:36]) and the Siege of Jerusalem, exemplify the shifting tides of power, where strategic ingenuity by leaders like Saladin ([72:31] – [84:31]) began to tilt the balance in favor of the Islamic forces.

“The Crusaders could consistently win when they were going to fight the Muslims directly, but the Muslims found various tactics to get around this.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [59:48]

The fragmentation within the Muslim world, exacerbated by the rise of dynasties like the Zengids and Ayyubids, hindered a unified defense against the Crusader states. This division was skillfully exploited by Saladin, who not only recaptured Jerusalem but also earned admiration from his Christian counterparts for his chivalry and leadership.

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Economic and Cultural Impacts on Europe

Rudyard Lynch ([78:18] – [111:41]):
The Crusades acted as a conduit for the transfer of knowledge, technology, and culture from the Islamic world to Europe. This exchange accelerated the European Renaissance, fostering advancements in science, philosophy, and commerce. The establishment of Crusader states necessitated sophisticated administrative systems, which later influenced the centralization of European monarchies.

“The Crusades was the first outward facing manifestation of Western civilization.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [22:45]

Italian maritime republics like Venice and Genoa thrived, taking control of Mediterranean trade routes and laying the foundations for modern banking and capitalism. Institutions such as the Knights Templar played a significant role in financial innovations, including the development of early banking practices.

“They established checks in European markets...that was the origin of the bank check.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [124:57]

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The Decline of the Crusader States and the Rise of the Ottoman Empire

Rudyard Lynch ([111:41] – [130:35]):
The prolonged Crusades ultimately led to the weakening of both the Byzantine Empire and the Crusader states. The Fourth Crusade's diversion to Constantinople ([94:30] – [99:11]) resulted in the sack of the city, further destabilizing Byzantine resistance and paving the way for Ottoman ascendancy. The decisive Battle of Ain Jalut ([105:13] – [111:41]) marked a turning point, where the Mamluks halted the Mongol advance, ensuring the survival of the Islamic world against both Mongol and Crusader pressures.

“The fall of Constantinople...would have changed the course of history, preventing the rise of the Ottoman Empire.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [98:09]

As the Crusader states dwindled, the Ottoman Turks emerged as the dominant power in the region, unifying disparate Muslim factions and establishing an empire that would last until the early 20th century. This shift not only altered the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East but also redirected European expansionist efforts towards new horizons.

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Legacy and Long-Term Consequences

Rudyard Lynch ([130:37] – End):
Reflecting on the Crusades' legacy, Rudyard highlights their role in shaping modern Western civilization. The Crusades fostered a spirit of exploration, innovation, and economic integration that propelled Europe into the Age of Discovery and beyond. Additionally, the cultural and intellectual exchanges laid the groundwork for the Renaissance and the subsequent scientific revolution.

“Progress doesn't just occur. It requires action, and the Crusades were a catalyst for that action in Europe.”
— Rudyard Lynch, [128:57]

The enduring impact of the Crusades is evident in the continued cultural and political ties between Europe and the Middle East, as well as in the enduring narratives of heroism, chivalry, and conflict that stem from this tumultuous period.

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Notable Quotes

• Rudyard Lynch ([04:22]):
  “I consider the Crusades to be a prime white people moment...where when your society is bored and you just do something excessively based just to let off steam.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([07:42]):
  “The Battle of Manzikert...the Byzantine army was slaughtered by the Seljuks.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([25:36]):
  “The Pope was thinking, how do I...redirect these masculine warrior energies towards our external opponents?”

• Rudyard Lynch ([59:48]):
  “The Crusaders could consistently win when they were going to fight the Muslims directly, but the Muslims found various tactics to get around this.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([22:45]):
  “The Crusades was the first outward facing manifestation of Western civilization.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([124:57]):
  “They established checks in European markets...that was the origin of the bank check.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([98:09]):
  “The fall of Constantinople...would have changed the course of history, preventing the rise of the Ottoman Empire.”

• Rudyard Lynch ([128:57]):
  “Progress doesn't just occur. It requires action, and the Crusades were a catalyst for that action in Europe.”

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Conclusion

In "Explaining the Crusades," Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide an expansive and nuanced exploration of one of history's most complex and impactful series of events. By intertwining military, economic, and cultural narratives, they illuminate how the Crusades were not merely religious wars but pivotal moments that reshaped civilizations and set the stage for the modern world.

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Learn More:
For additional insights and episodes, visit www.turpentine.co.

Transcript

[Whatifalth]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist Redyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Bonjour, senior. Set topique ele Croissade.

[Austin Padgett]

Well, it's going great, sir. I'm here with Richard the Lionheart. Beautiful country. Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So remember that meme from, like, 10 years ago where that, like, edgy teenage guy was. Was saying when you were out partying? I was studying the blade.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

In retrospect, that guy kind of made the best call considering the way society is going. Like, if you spend years studying how to be a marshall, a martial weapons expert these days, that might actually be a useful skill.

[Austin Padgett]

Especially for riots or in London where you don't have. You can't use guns.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So today's topic is the Crusades. I was. I had a tangent there. I chose not to go on, but. So I consider the Crusades to be a prime white people moment. And what I mean by that is that a white people moment is that when your society is bored and you just do something excessively based just to let off steam. White people moments involve the age of Discovery, the Crusades, the Alexander the Great, where in most studies, Asians and Europeans have comparable levels of intelligence. The thing, though, is that Europeans have more statistical outliers. And I think this is kind of symbolic for Europe versus the Orient. And I. The Orient is a term which has both validity and it doesn't. The differences inside the Orient between India, Islam, China are as great as those between the West. The west is closer to Islam culturally than it is to India than Islam. Islam and Christianity are closer to each other than any of the other four great civilizations of Eurasia. And you do see similarities, though. You. You do see similarities across all Asian civilizations, and you see similarities across European civilizations, which you can see between the Greeks and the recent West Europeans, who have a lot of similar traits, between colonial empires spawning singular great leaders who launched these enormous conquests, periods of technological and cultural advancement that are fallen by degeneracy. European and Asian societies tend to have different specific civilizational curves. They tend to be killed by different civilizational factors over the long term. And the Crusades is such an insane moment, because the Crusades was right when the modern Western, as Spengler called it, Faustian civilization, gained consciousness. And it reminds me, I had an experience when I was 13 where I started having perception of my own perception, or when I was 13, where I didn't read a single book until I was that age. And then what happened is that I had one of my dad's books, the Book of Swords, and I saw a single page and I thought, if I can read a single page of this book, I can read the entire book. I can read a thousand pages because if I can do a singular task, I can do the task on repeat. That's what Europe realized. The Crusades where and Spengler. I'm taking the white people moment from Spengler because. Because his idea is modern Western civilization is fian. And the fian spirit is just basically selling your soul to do the most insane thing possible and then buckling back at the final end. And the Crusades is a manifestation of that. Because Europe in 1100 AD they had come out of centuries of a bad period. It was the second lull of the Dark Ages where around 600 AD after the fall of Rome, Europe was in a pretty bad place. Then they pulled things together under the Franks. Then in the 800s the Frankish Empire fell apart. And by the time you get through the eight through nine hundreds until a thousand, Europe was facing constant invasions from the Magyar, Hungarians, the Vikings and the Arabs. And, and that meant that Europe hardened itself and it formed the feudal structure as a way to basically fight off the other enemies. And Europe gained this inner strength where over the course of the 11th century and there's a great book called the Birth of Europe by Collins about the topic where how Europe fought off the invaders, established the countries of modern Europe which were in a sort of pregnant form in the 11th century. And then it launched the Crusades. So the Crusades was the first outward facing manifestation of Western civilization.

[Austin Padgett]

First outward facing manifestation and what into the Middle East?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I guess outside the western core. The Western core is an anthropological civilizational term for South England, France, the north of Spain, the west of Germany, the Netherlands and North Italy. That's the core region where the vast majority of technological cultural, philosophic breakthroughs has occurred in world history. Especially for the last 500 years. Because people say Europe did all this stuff. But even more so, it's a certain core region of Europe. And that core region was the Frankish Empire. And England, that was the area that got attacked by the three sided invasions of the Vikings, the Magyars and the Arabs. That area formed itself together and then after it formed, the first thing it did was launch the Crusades, which in my book is pretty based right?

[Austin Padgett]

If you look at the maps from, from that time, it's quite a long period of Islamic encroachment and other pressures around that core you mentioned. And the Crusades happen at the same time that it starts to expand out the other way for the first time. So when you see it in that context it's a little bit less like Europe just deciding to run all over the Middle east and a reversal of a really long term trend. The other way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, you put that very well. Because I do not think the Greeks and the Romans were Western civilization. They don't have any of the hallmarks. The we selectively see the traits we took from the Greeks and the Romans without actually seeing their character. Because the Greco Roman classical civilization, it was polytheistic, it didn't have the same frame as consciousness as us. They believed the universe was a bunch of sub competing gods fighting over earth. They were a collectivist clan society. They didn't have a concept of individual freedom. They were a predominantly slave based economy, not really a market based economy. They were, it's just their, their just entire frame of reality was different. And so we look to the traits that we get from the Greeks and the Roman. But you, the Muslims and the orthodox civilization have argued quite convincingly that they are also heirs to the Greeks and the Romans. The Muslims have the closest family and social structure to what they had. Family, social, economic structure. And Western civilization formed as a side effect of the fall of Rome with the mixing of Germanic Latinate and Germanic Latinate and Christian influence. And it formed gradually over time through the Dark ages. Charlemagne was the first great Western empire. Then out of the rubble of his empire came the high medieval Renaissance which occurred around a thousand ad. And it's interesting to compare Islam and Christendom smashing into each other in the Crusades because it's two societies that are on very different trajectories with very different life cycles which are the exact opposite today. Where the Muslim world arose 400 years earlier under the Prophet Muhammad and they front loaded their development. Where early Islam was around, let's say 900 A.D. the most scientifically advanced, philosophically advanced, feminist, literate, wealthy and capitalist society in the world. Where Islam in 900 AD had a lot, there's this meme where it's 1000 AD versus today. Christendoms I'm in a thousand AD were focused on religion. Islam were for science where Islam actually experienced its own moral degeneracy with the collapse of Islamic faith in anarchist communist rebels. And they had nihilism and atheism and a feminist movement and all those things. And then Islam's Dark Ages meant There was a social conservative revolution that won. And we're living in the consequences of the social conservatives winning. After the Islamic Dark Ages. Europe had gone through a dark age and they were on the road up, but they were still vastly more primitive than Islam at the start of the Crusades. By the end of the Crusades, Europe had already exceeded Islam in most metrics. So the Crusades was this sort of like warm up period where the Christians gradually built up advancement over the Muslims to eventually overtake them. And, and so it's interesting where we flip the dynamic where it's the two same civilizations but they're in the opposite place. And it makes you wonder, will the current wars between Christendom and Islam do the same thing to Islam that the Crusades did to the West? Will the centuries of Muslims fighting the Christians force the Muslims to go through their own innovation period comparable to the European High Middle Ages? I don't know, but it's a possibility.

[Austin Padgett]

I think so because you see the way that Saudi Arabia talks about it, they very clearly measure their like wealth and power connected to their development and connected to like their superiority. Yes, against the other Muslim countries. So there's a competition and they've been, they were developed 30 years ago, I think I mentioned Syria had an economy that was three times wealthier than Ukraine. So they already know how to do it. So if you have the, you know, like you said, the Abraham Accords are like hinting at this similarity between Christianity and Islam at least compared to Islamic, you know, the Eastern, some sort of like cultural baseline. And so I think you'll see develop we might actually get peace in the Middle east for the first time in a, in a while, which would be kind of fun.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I don't think they'll have peace. I think they might have productive war where I'm. So I'm of two minds here. The first is that taking bets on third world countries is always a bad decision. People have invested in Africa or Argentina so many times and each time it fails. The thing with the Middle east though is that always look to past track record to determine future success. The Middle east until pretty recently has had levels of development comparable to the west even a little bit more than 300 years ago. The Turkish guns were the fear of Europe and the Turks were seen as having a better military than a lot of European governments. And so the Muslims do have a track record of being able to have an advanced civilized society. But at the same time the innovations recently over the Middle east have, until fairly recently there have been a Failure. But there's a few different things. The first is the Middle east is majority industrialized now. Turkey is industrialized. Iran's industrialized parts of Iraq are. Israel is George. Jordan is Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arabs probably a few more. And like, even in places like Syria that are still poor, if you go to the cities, there's still going to be nice hotels and electricity and highways. It's not like what, there's different tiers of industrialization. When I look at travel thing, I look at travel sites for bizarre places in the third world. And so in New guinea and in the Congo, there's one good hotel. And then all of the reviews under it are why the hell are you here? Literally look up TripAdvisor Port, Port Moresby and King Shasta. One overpriced good hotel. All the other reviews are why the hell would you ever go here? I've looked up travel guides for Burkina Faso and Chad. And the answer is always why are you here? They literally say that in the TripAdvisor. But this is not the Crusades. We go on too many tangents on this podcast. I'm fine with, I'm fine with 15% tangent, not 25% tangent. And so crusades, there are two, let's say, axes that got the Crusades started. First is the Seljuk Turks and the second is the Franks, where this is the mid 11th century. And the Middle east had earlier stabilized under this sort of governance with the Abbasid Caliphate that was this Persian Arab state. And the Byzantines. And the Byzantines held Anatolia and then the Abbasids held the rest of the Middle east. And the Abbasid Empire had fallen apart in the mid 9th century. And this created this period of chaos which I call the Islamic Dark Ages, where they there was a breakdown of central authority. And this was really traumatic for the Muslims because their entire worldview was dar al Islam. We are under the Khalif. And the Khalif is our connection to God. And so it's why so many Muslim movements today are predicated upon this idea that we need to unify the Arab or the Muslim world into a single governance. That's the cause of most of the terrorism and instability in the Muslim world today.

[Whatifalth]

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[Rudyard Lynch]

Into this void came the Seljuk Turks, and when we think of Turkey, we think of the modern country of Turkey, which straddles between the Bosphorus and the Caucasus, which is a nearly European country. The thing though is the Turks are originally from Mongolia and they migrated west over the course of the European Dark Age period, and you had confederacies like the Gok Turk confederacy that dominated much of Central Asia. And the Turks actually were instrumental in a lot of Chinese dynasties, the Tang Dynasty, in which China was at its greatest position ever in the 8th century. They had a lot of Turkic blood. But the thing is, when we see Turkish people, we're seeing people who are not that physically close to the original Turks. I've been to Turkey. It's one of my favorite countries. You have certain, like, people who look European, certain people who look Middle Eastern, certain people who look Mediterranean, certain people who look almost like Native Americans or Asians. Because the inhabitants of modern Turkey were mostly the original Greeks and Anatolians who had been assimilated over the course of the medieval period in Turkish culture. The original Turks were basically Mongol or East Asian, and they migrated west over this period. And the original inhabitants of Central Asia were ethnically European. The Turks came in genocide at the initial population. And now the Kazakhs or the Uzbeks, look, they look Asian. They look like a mix between European and Asian. Seljuk Turks. They migrated west, and they were originally from Kazakhstan. And with the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in the Islamic Dark Age, you saw a breakdown of social trust within Central Asia and, sorry, within the Muslim world. And with that, they could no longer recruit from the Muslim inhabitants. So the governments of the Muslim world had to recruit these soldiers, which they called Ghoulams or Mama Lukes or. Or they had a few other names for them where they would hire slave soldiers to. To fight for them. Because also with the way the Muslim world worked, you could not trust someone else to serve in your government, because the family and the clan is so powerful in Islam that if you put someone else in power, their ultimate loyalty is to their family members. So the problem Islamic governments ran into was the leading family had to hire out their family members because they were the only ones they could trust. And outside the family, it wasn't a very high trust environment. What they then did was, was hire slave soldiers, mostly Turks from Central Asia, but later, later slaves from the Caucasus or the Circassians or the Pontic Grasslands or modern Ukraine. And these will end up becoming one of the most important players in this game. And I'm going to colloquially call them, actually, I'm going to call them the Ghoulams for the Seljuks, and I'm going to call them the Mamelukes for Egypt. I'm going to keep this historically accurate. And so the Abbasids in these Eastern Islamic governments hired the Seljuks and other Varieties of Turk to work as these slave soldiers for them. And you ended up with these very strange situations where because the slave soldiers were the ones in charge, they were very wealthy. So you'd have slaves with palaces and servants. But they were still slaves. They still weren't like technically getting paid. They still had no freedom. And the obvious conclusion to this is that the slave soldiers take power because power comes from the blade of a sword. And if you give someone a sword, they're going to have power. And so across the Muslim world you saw the rise of these Mameluke slave dynasties. Such as the Mameluke slaves took over most of North India with the Delhi Sultanate. They later took over Egypt, which we're going to talk about. And the Seljuk Turks were slave soldiers who then pulled on Turks from the actual barbarian steppe lands of Tartary. I love the word Tartary. And they conquered the entire Middle East. The Abbasid Caliph was forced into this sort of, this sort of subsidiary role to the Seljuks, where he became the Pope. He was the spiritual leader of Islam, but he lacked any actual power. And so the Seljuks, they took out Persia, Afghanistan, Transoxiana, Armenia, Iraq and then Syria. They had the entire Middle east. And they attacked the Byzantine Empire. And this is one of the most important battles in history which everyone has forgot. At the battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine army was slaughtered by the Seljuks. And it was a pretty close battle. And then with the wipeout of the Byzantine army, the Seljuks conquered Anatolia, which later became the hub of the Turkish nation. And this was one of the most important things in history, because Anatolia, turning from Christian to Muslim turned the. Because the Turks, they're hard men, they can support a strong empire, which you've seen multiple times in history. And they're also in a highly strategic point. And so if Anatolia remained Christian, Byzantine Orthodox civilization would have been a world civilization, I think comparable in importance to Japan or Russia or India, something like that. But then the Byzantines are losing Anatolia. They were shoved in this long term decline. And within a few years of the losses at Manzikert, the Seljuks were at the gates of Constantinople. They crossed all of Anatolia towards the fortress city of Constantinople. And then the Byzantine Emperor asked the Pope who the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches had already fallen apart. And he asked the Pope to send him a few knights to save Constantinople from the Turkish invasions. And this was the start of the Crusades, because the Pope had his own aims, which he was Trying to push.

[Austin Padgett]

And what were those aims?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Europe was going through an overpopulation period where you saw France had become a failed state, England had their own civil war, and that called the anarchy. There was the conflict between the German Emperor and the Pope. And these crises were basically an overflow of knights trying to do things. So Europe was covered in conflict, and Europe didn't really have coherent governments by this point. And so the First Crusade was mostly dukes and counts and those people, because the governments were still unifying. And by the time you get to the Third Crusade, you'll have coherent states like the English and the French and the Germans attacking the Holy. Attacking the Holy Land. So the Pope wanted to get rid of excess knights. And this was also one of the high periods of the Church's power, where the Church had done a really good job of several generations of reforms. And so they could genuinely pull up on the goodwill of Western Christendom, where the Pope was a respected moral authority. Authority. And so the Pope was thinking, how do I, first of all, civilize these knights? Where the Catholic Church actually invented POW laws in this time period, they helped invent chivalry. All of the customs we use to lessen the brutality of war were initially developed by the Catholic Church in this era. So the Catholic Church was thinking, how do we redirect this masculine warrior energy towards our external opponents? And as Christendom, as it was called, was attaining collective consciousness, its identity was predominantly Christian. And so their thinking was, we could just use these excess guys to liberate the Holy Land. They get to go on an adventure, we get to fight the Muslims, we can return to the sacred relics and get all of the important stuff to make sure that our Holy city is not controlled by the Muslims. And so the Pope, upon hearing the Byzantine Emperor wanting support to fight the Turks, walked across Italy to France and then gave a famous speech at Cluny where he was talking to these knights of the French nation. And keep in mind, France was a failed state. The King of France had an area the size of Delaware. So he was talking to the ethnic French nation rather than the King of France. And he. He said that if you go on Crusade, I will absolve you of all of your sins. And this was an era where the Catholic Church had profound control over the psychologies and the worldviews of the average West European. They hadn't had the innovation of reading the ancient Greeks and the Romans, which later made them more cynical or contact with Oriental religions to. To. To not be naively Christian. And so this spread like wildfire because Europe also had a highly masculine warrior culture where a lot of the Crusaders, they were the grandkids of the Vikings especially so with the Normans. And so you have this Germanic warrior culture which in Norse culture the greatest good was to die in battle. And heroism was the ultimate virtue. And so the Church went through a lot of effort on how to make Christianity masculine enough for the Europeans. And so this was just seen as this perfect cross section for everyone involved. The knights got to fight and get glory and adventure, while the Pope got to redirect their masculine energies in a Christian way. And so it spread like wildfire where Europe just went crazy. And it was a huge cultural moment, not just for going on the Crusades and literally tens of thousands of men massed to walk thousands of miles to the Holy Land.

[Austin Padgett]

I'm wondering how this must have impacted European politics, because I know, I think Scotland kind of made unusual alliances with England at the time because the kings had fought together in the Crusade. So they thought they could. They developed a cross national kinship in Ukraine that they took back to their home countries that wasn't exactly shared by the home populations. I'm wondering if there's more examples of that kind of thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

An important point to keep in mind is that this is a 200 year time frame and Europe's populate, Europe's structure of everything changed a lot in that 200 years. Where once you get its first crusade is 1099 or 1090, I don't know, like the, the 11th crusade. I lose track of how many final Crusades there are. There's too many irrelevant ones at the end. 1291 was when the Mamelukes finally took, took back the Lebanese coastline. And so it's a 200 year time frame. And so in the first crusade, governments were not really strong enough to fight on the Crusade as their own players. Where it was lots of noblemen from the central region that the Crusades were pulled from was from the Loire to the Rhine, so northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, western part of Germany. And they pulled from a wider area. Like for example, there was a Norwegian crusade in the 13th century where they sailed all the way from Norway, where a few Icelanders went on that Crusade. The south of Italy in the First Crusade was the predominant government involved, where the Norman government of Sicily and Naples, where the Normans were these Vikings who settled in the north of France, who then as mercenaries conquered south Italy from the locals, the Byzantines and the Arabs, they were the big political force because they were just in the thick of it. And they had the right culture and they were already adventurers. And I have this, actually, I don't think I ever bought this book. I saw this book on the logistics, on the logistical and social side effects of the Crusades and I skimmed through it and it's one of those books where you're like, this is 300 pages. I could pick up the general gist of it from just flicking through the pages. I don't have to do the rest. And so the thesis of the book is that the Crusades was actually quite important for the creating of European governments because the military and logistical efforts required to get men from Europe to the Holy Land were so great that it forced these governments to develop larger systems of just dealing with things which they could then use to impart back in Europe.

[Austin Padgett]

Was it funded by taxes or combination?

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Europe had a feudal structure and it was very difficult for any European governments to raise taxes because if the king tried to, all the nobility would rebel. If you read enough medieval history, there's this sort of archetype of the king raises taxes 0.3%, then this causes a seven year war of the nobility rebelling. And, and so kings could raise taxes under certain contexts. The English could raise taxes, the French could under certain contexts. But that was hard fought over the course of centuries. And the creation of parliaments was as the kings were crushing the nobility, they had to find a way to rope the nobility into the negotiating process to get them to work with it. And so the feudal system operated where the king would give out lands to his nobility. The nobility would in turn have their retainers or knights. And so it was this patronage system where everyone was gifting land to the person beneath them. And, and the patronage system operated through getting fighting men. So the Holy Roman Emperor would sub, subdivide the Duke of Saxony. The Duke, the Duke of Saxony had to supply him 2,000 knights. I made that number up and then that was his duty. Later on they got the ability to raise taxes. But the first Crusade was done through predominantly feudal retainers. And actually the development of a money economy was one of the side effects of the Crusades. Because Europe did have a money economy, it wasn't that advanced. Like you'll see these huge just supplies of treasure in the Frankish Empire or in Viking sites from the Dark Ages. The idea that they didn't have a financial currency is a myth. But the integration of the Mediterranean into North Europe's economic system, which was a side effect of the Crusades, caused the commercialization of Europe's economy and the rise of capitalism. And this is all part of a dynamic holistic process where this was the high medieval renaissance which was fed into by the Crusades, but it was also its own variable. But that was a very good catch you made for both the power and the commercials. I wouldn't have caught that.

[Austin Padgett]

We're just with how they funded it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, it's a good catch on your part because that, that was a detail that's true. I just didn't notice it.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Yeah. Important to figure out how it works.

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[Austin Padgett]

Interesting that Islam created a single trade zone in the beginning. Right. And you said that there's a big doc, there's a big thing with Islam where they want to create a single caliphate. Is that like doctrinal or is that a call back to the time when they were most successful?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, I think it's a combination of both. Where.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. You could interpret it that way.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I'm sure the ideal is that we are all part of Dar al Islam or the House of Islam governed by the Prophet Muhammad. The problem though is you can't get, you can't get multiple Prophet Muhammad. And so almost all of Islamic theology and legal society and civilization is how do you make up for the absence of the Prophet Muhammad? And you try all these different methods like the hadiths and that stuff.

[Austin Padgett]

That's. Yeah, that's just really interesting because they're dealing with the problem of not having the Muhammad figure required to run the structure. Yeah, and it seems like it worked in the beginning because they created a single trade zone which creates short term advantages and, and it was run, you know, based on a lot of the standards at the time, like through the Greek merchants and things.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes.

[Austin Padgett]

And then they probably just started actually reading the Quran too much.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So early Islam was a capitalist society. It was the most capitalist society in the world. And the Prophet Muhammad was himself a merchant. And so the Islam has these caveats and stuff to make life easier for merchants. And Islam was spread across Africa, Central Asia and the, the melee archipelago in the eastern oceans through merchants. And so the idea that Islam is an innately anti capitalist, anti growth religion, which is something a lot of people think now, it's just not true. What happened over time is that I'll call them, I call people who are reliant on competing with currents, hermetic forces, because in the Hermetica you master cha chaotic currents to ride with them. So I call scientists capitalists, like people who follow the stock market or the Internet. I call them the hermetic classes because if you have to like do a thing and have chaos entrepreneurs too, your job is basically riding the current of chaos and dominating it. So the hermetic classes and the probably the most advanced period for alchemy in the Hermetica ever was the Islamic golden age. So that's not a coincidence. The city of Tarsus in the Islamic world in the, in that period they actually declared themselves a hermetic city. So those classes got wiped out in the aftermath of the fall of the Abis Abbasid Caliphate because the governing Abbasid caliphate leans really heavily on them. Where it was a capitalist economy was they were getting into some pretty degenerate territory where the dominant philosophic school was that Islam was not special versus other religions because they were borrowing so heavily from the Greeks and the Hermetics and the Christians that they had downplayed the importance of Islam in the society. And women got near complete equality with men. Women could be judges. There was, there was black anarchist slave revolts in South Iraq, then there was Islamic Islamic anarchist messianic revolts in Azerbaijan and then you had Persian nationalists in Iran. So lots of dynamics that seem straight out of the 20th century were occurring in 10th century Islam. What then occurred was the great figure of this age, Al Ghazali, he made the argument, and he was originally persecuted by the, the liberal government because the liberals dominated the Abbasid Caliphate and then the conservatives fought back against the liberals and won. And Al Ghazali's argument was that the Prophet Muhammad is God's truth. He is the ultimate default. Studying the outside world is not worthwhile because if it's not the Prophet Muhammad's truth, because God can control all of reality, studying the outside world is not fundamentally worthwhile because God can change the world at a whim. And the thing is, that sounds really bad to us Westerners, but that is the rationally correct argument to reach from a mono, a complete monotheistic worldview. God determines everything. So submit to God's word. The problem is that that's not actually a good strategy. And it's, it's strange because the Islamic Dark Age was a really bad period where the cities of central Iran, you had cities of over a million people on the Iranian plateau, not connected to any rivers or like major water sources. So with these cities of a million people in the Middle Eastern desert, and they were almost completely wiped out over the course, like these cities were empty 200 years later. And the Islamic world, I think in the year 1500, in the year, let's say the Islamic world in the year 15 to 1700 had less than half the people it did in the year 1100. Egypt had half the people under Napoleon, as it did during the start of the Crusades. So the Islamic Dark Ages was this really brutal period where entire regions got depopulated. And, and what happened is that the barbarians and the social conservatives won. The social conservatives just bred more, they held onto the institutions, they had the fiber to survive this. And so they became the dominant faction in the Islamic world. So you saw this overreaction of degeneracy and then you saw this overreaction of conservatism. So the reason the Islamic world is so misogynistic and controls women to a degree that I just think is immoral, is they're overreacting to a thousand years ago.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, the more you overreact with your reaction, the longer you're going to have to pay for it. And the bounce back, it's like all about flattening the volatility. And that's a big, big cycle that's like a 500 year on each end.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So. So capitalism died across the Muslim world as part of this broader process of just the loss of a high trust society. As an example, the Sultan of Yemen in the 14th century, he created a 75% tariff on trade up the Red Sea because Yemen has this throttle on trade in the Red Sea. So that killed Egypt's economy because he was just so extractive. The Mamelukes who ran Egypt, they basically kept the population in borderline slavery to stealing everything. And that's why Egypt's population halved over the Black Death and then didn't recover until the Industrial Revolution, because the Mamluks just kept such a tight boot on their population. It's funnily enough, when I finished, I went to college for like a semester and a half. And my final paper for the year was on the economy of Mameluke Egypt. And so it's just a horrible story. And then you look at Persia and Central Asia. The Mongols genocided that off the face of the earth. And so the Islamic world went through this active process of putting themselves through civilizational decay. And we don't notice it because there's still an Islam today with the fall of Rome. I think the fall of the Islamic Golden Age is an event historically comparable to to the fall of Rome, because Islam could have been a great civilization, but we don't notice it because it would be as if Rome fell. Then Rome was taken in by this really powerful form of social conservatism which gave them the outward trappings of Rome, but they had lost all of their vitality and creativity.

[Austin Padgett]

Like if Rome became China, almost.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. It's very much like that. The issue with the great Asian civilizations is fossilization. So the thing I had to fact check is that the Crusades killed about 3 million people, which is historically nothing. The Mongols killed close to 80 million. The Napoleonic wars is like 8 to 10 million. The US Civil War was 600,000. And so most of the people who killed in the Crusades were Muslims killing other Muslims. Because you. And we're going to see this where the Mamelukes burned every major city of the Levant at the end of the 13th century to stop the Crusaders from coming. Where because the Crusaders would take the Levant, hold the cities, the Mamelukes made the decision the only way to stop the 200 years of crusader conquests is to burn every major city in the Levant, populated majority, so by Muslims, so that the Crusaders have no toehold.

[Austin Padgett]

Interesting. Yeah. And most of the Crusades happened around the Levant, right?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, you got. You had some others in each. Egypt was the other locust. But the Crusaders were never able to really secure power over Egypt. And so when the Jews moved to Israel in the mid-20s, early to mid 20th century there, the land was largely empty. And that puzzled me because you read out the Crusade, you have these huge cities like Acre or Jaffa, etc Ascalon. And the reason was that the first of all the Mamelukes burned all the major cities. Then the Turks who ruled the region from the 16th through the 20th centuries, they maintained this highly oppressive structure of, of tax farming where the Turkish government would sell the office of tax farming. Then the tax farmers were rewarded for how much they could take from the population. So what happened was that you would never work, you would never produce anything because the tax farmer would just steal it from you and.

[Austin Padgett]

Right, right. So this was the Mamaluke's occupation of the region. You couldn't do any farming because it was too taxable. So it was basically you had some herder societies and there were people there, but it was like the same way we talk about North American Indians after the disease wiped them out. Yeah, there's some people here and there, but generally there are these like large areas that were not suitable to agriculture without advanced technology. In the exact same way that the Dutch expanded the arable land around South.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Africa, people in the Levant would operate as herders and also they would live in places like mountains or out of the way places just to avoid the tax collectors. So it became this super low trust society. And the worst people I've ever done business with is Israelis. And I think that has to be part of the culture where they. It's just very exploitive from the centuries of Turkish and Mamluk governance.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. There's no charity in the negotiation. It's, it's like 100% whatever you can get, man.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I got some stories. I've worked with some good Israeli firms too. Every part of this conversation is taboo, by the way. I have uttered four different taboos for different groups by this point.

[Austin Padgett]

I noticed the, the most, the best negotiators of any third world country I've ever been to was in Morocco. So it makes me think of the kind of Middle east connection where it's just like completely relentless.

[Rudyard Lynch]

My mom, my mom partly grew up in Iran and she and my grandmother would frequently talk about the politeness of Iranians and like how civil the culture is where they have this very structured code of just courtesy. But the Crusades, so first Crusade amasses in Europe and they're going to walk the long way to the Middle East. This is one of the very few crusades done by land. And they walked through Hungary, they murdered a bunch of Jews on their way out there where there was the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the German Rhineland. One of the worst pogroms in European history due to The First Crusade, where. Because it created this sense of just, I'd say Christian nationalism, because their ethnic identity was tied to their religious identity. In order to fight the infidel abroad, not the infidel. In order to fight the infidel in the Muslim world, you might as well fight the infidel at home. That being legit. But the Jews still stayed in Western Europe for another 200 years till they were kicked out in the early 13th century. And then they walked across Europe. They reached Byzantium. And we have the primary sources of what the Byzantines thought about the Crusaders, where they were shocked at how brave and cunning they were, but they thought they were savages. And we have. The emperor was Alexius Comnenus. His daughter was Anna Comnena. She has records of talking to the Crusaders. And the Byzantines did not trust the Crusaders at all. They always kept them at an arm's length where they thought of them as savages who came from a lower culture. And they were shocked at how direct they were because the Byzantines were stuck in all these Byzantine court politics. Byzantine is a term for when you have a court situation with all of these players who have these schemes and private interests and everyone's got their own story. And the Crusaders showed up and the Byzantines tried to shepherd them across the. Across the. The Dardanelles as soon as possible to fight the Turks. And they forced at least one of the Crusader leaders to sign an oath of fealty that any lands he would conquer in the Orient he would give to the Byzantine emperor. And he violated this oath. But there was a big legal issue about that down the road. And they fought the. The Turks at Nicaea, beating them. And this gave the Byzantines some breathing room where they built out their position in Anatolia. And they reconquered the entire coastline of Anatolia until losing to the Turks at the Battle of Konya, which I called the Battle of Konya in the mid 12th century, which was Manziker. It really hurt the Byzantines. Kanye also really hurt them. And the Turks migrated. Sorry. The Crusaders walked across Anatolia, which was utterly brutal, was actually the hardest part of the First Crusade. And they faced huge drought issues. They faced food issues. They were starving. And thousands of them died because the Europeans didn't have a concept of what dry land was like because they had no parallel in Western Europe. And they didn't really know how the rest of the world was because the Dark Ages had broke down their connections. Where I was reading the Chanson de Roland, which was a chasson de guerre which was this genre of war music that existed in 11th and 10th century Europe. And it's singing at fighting the Muslims at the Battle of Roncesvall with one of Charlemagne's leaders, the Lord of the March of Brittany, Roland, who held off multiple waves of Islamic invaders. Except the story is highly propagandized and it's not an accurate reflection of the historic events. But they'll talk about the Muslims worshiping Apollo, and there's some weird symbolic, like, esoteric explanation for that that still doesn't really make sense to me. But they just did not have knowledge of other cultures. So they would say stuff like the Muslims would worship Apollo, and that was just taken for granted. So they didn't know how the Middle east worked. And they had to go through this learning process where they pretty quickly figured out the dynamic there. But after crossing the Anatolian desert, they hit Odessa. And Odessa is like the region of South Turkey that borders Syria. It was majority Armenian Christian, actually. And the Crusaders had various Christian allies in the Levant, where this was before the Muslim world had basically consumed their Christian minorities, where until the year 1000, the Middle east was majority Christian. And the 11th century was a tipping point where the Muslims started mass converting the majority populations. Wait, no. A thousand AD was the start of the period where the Muslims mass converted their entire region to Islam. But you still had, I would guess, like a quarter to a third of the Levant's population being Christian. And the problem here was that the Crusaders, who were Catholics, tried to work with the local Christians, but they would get stuck in these issues over dogma. And so you would hope that the Byzantine Empire and the Crusaders would be allies due to both being Christians fighting against a lot of Muslims. But that was not, in fact, true. Where over the course of this period, the Crusaders did fight the Byzantines and ultimately destroyed them in the fourth Crusade. But the Christians tried to work with the Armenian minorities. Sometimes they got were able to cooperate with the Christian Oriental religions. Well, sometimes it blew up. They gradually developed the colonial system we'll talk about. But then one of the commanders, a Norman leader who was from Sicily, he peeled off from the rest of the Crusade and attacked Antioch, making himself the Prince of Antioch. And so this was kind of a dick move in several different ways. But I also don't blame him. War is war. Because he had pledged that if Antioch became his possession, that it would be under the Byzantine monarchy. And I think he might have, like, technically given the paperwork to the Byzantine Emperor that said that. But the reality, which everyone knew was he was governing at his own fief. And he also gave up and didn't actually follow to Jerusalem, but this Norman dynasty in, in Syria, which I think that was Bohemond, who did that. And this was one of the most long lasting Crusader states. Antioch was. This Syrian city is one of the most important cities of the Roman Empire. Actually. It became. It was this huge city that was really difficult to take. And then the Crusaders went down the coast where I believe at the siege of. It has to be Jaffa. Jaffa is modern Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv. It's either Jaco Jaffa or it's Acre. So there was this horrible siege where the Crusaders had to take this city and it took them a tremendous amount of time and they were, they were starving and there were several periods where they were, they were deathly certain that they were gonna die because the siege was taking so long. And there are several very like heroic, manly moments to the Crusades in these battles because the Crusaders and the Muslims had the opposite fighting method. The Crusaders ought to operate with armor and they had knights, these sort of tanks of just men on horseback charging into the enemy, smashing into them. Well, most of the Muslims operated off remote horse archer tactics. They'd ride around, fire back off. It was peak direct versus indirect. Well, you did have some Muslim heavy cavalry, like the Mamelukes, but in lots of battles where the Crusaders were ostensibly incredibly outnumbered because they were fighting thousands of miles from home, they were consistently able to beat Muslim armies significantly larger than them because they were first of all braver and they had better armor and better hand to hand training. So when you force a Christian army to fight a Muslim army, the Christians would normally win, but the Muslims developed various tactics to get around this, where the Muslims had more men and the Muslims were also more cunning. And the great victories of the Crusades were often like the Horns of Hattin done by trick.

[Austin Padgett]

Were they going to walk into the desert?

[Rudyard Lynch]

We're going, yes. I want to explain the Horns of Hattin, but it's a spoiler. We have to get to the Second Crusade. Oh, I didn't.

[Austin Padgett]

It reminds me of Greeks in Persia.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, yes. Military historians have spoken about this to a great depth. Wait, I was wrong. The siege of Antioch was the big siege that was difficult to take. It wasn't Jaffa and it wasn't. Yeah, Acre. I guess I'll just commit seppuku now. I forgot to mention Peter the Hermit. Who he was this. He was what he sounded like. He was a hermit and a religious figure who would wander around Western Europe whipping up support. And Peter the Hermit had a cult of personality and he got a lot of men to, to go to the, to go to the orientation. But after the siege of Antioch that was so difficult. The Crusaders walked down until they hit Jerusalem where there was the siege of Jerusalem where they had to wait for years, not years, they had to wait for a very long time. And ultimately though, they were able to shatter through Jerusalem and take the city, provoking one of the worst atrocities in medieval history where they just butchered a huge part. And there was. They butchered the Christians, they butchered the Jews, the Muslims because they just had so much pent up rage and aggression. And earlier in the war, the Christians were more brutal than the Muslims. By the end the Muslims were more brutal than the Christians. They were both roughly comparable. There's this whole discourse about the Crusades were bad, which is. This is the friggin Middle Ages. Everyone is constantly fighting everyone else. The, the Muslims had jihads going back centuries. The Crusades were actually an implementation of the Muslim Jihad which existed beforehand. And it's just trying to view the medieval society through the prism of modern age of the last men. Managerial class stuff is. It's just silly and it's completely missing the point on a degree that our descendants will find embarrassing.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Sieges often result in massacres, especially with the soldiers and level of frustration that's not even always controllable by the commanders. It's like a classic dynamic that can get away from you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I was so, I was, I was trying to remember if the siege of Jerusalem they had water and food issues. They did. And so they were really built up around that. And they. Jerusalem was also under the Fatimid, the Fatimid state where you had the Seljuks who had fallen apart by the time of the First Crusade, which was good because I don't think the Crusaders would have been able to defeat the unified Seljuk state which would stretch from Transoxiana to Constantinople. But because they were one of those nomadic cult of personality empires where when the great dynasty falls, it splits up into these different factions. And so the Crusaders are fighting the Sultanate of Raoul first, which was the. The descendant state in Rawum or Rome, Anatolia and then the Zengids later gave the Crusaders a lot of grief. But they were fighting against the Turks in Syria. Then by the time they get to Palestine they were fighting the, the, the Fatimids. And they fought very differently. The Turks, the Crusaders from their primary sources wrote about them being profoundly manly and brave. They had respect for the Turks as men and saw them as equals to the Europeans. They did not have respect for the Arabs as warriors. They thought they were weak and effeminate. They also thought the Byzantines were weak and effeminate. But they did have a profound respect for the Arabs and civilization which a lot of Crusaders acknowledged. The Arabs had a higher level of civilization which later had the effect of implementing all of these Arab things in Europe. And so the Fatimids, they were governing Egypt and Egypt has not had a native government in the period between 500 BC and 1950. In that 2500 year period, Egypt was never governed by an ethnic Egyptian. And in this time period the ruling dynasty of Egypt were the Fatimids who were these Shia Berbers from Tunisia who launched this war across North Africa, seized control of Egypt and governed it from the 900s until the early 1200s. And Fatimid Egypt was actually one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced places in the world. The, the shift from the Fatimids to, to later the. Actually no, the Fatimids lost the mid 12th to the Ayyubids. The shift from the Fatimids slash Ayyubids to the Mamelukes is what killed Egypt sociologically and economically. But the Fatimids would fight with Mamelukes and so they had heavy cavalry like the knights, although they weren't as good at the knights. Then they had these peasant levies of local Egyptians and they also had horse archers. And so the Crusaders would write about fighting the Arabs because the Fatimids were majority ethnically Arab by this point especially so their population, not the ruling dynasty. And then the Turks as these two very different opponents.

[Austin Padgett]

Were the Arabs and Persians ever happy that the Europeans were fighting the Turks since they just got wrecked by the Mongols?

[Rudyard Lynch]

There was no. So the Arabs and the Persians were so beaten down they had kind of lost their national consciousnesses. They, they had ethnic identities which you see manifested in the culture and the literature and all that stuff. But I don't think there was practically any self governing Arab or Persian states at this time. The Turks had taken over all of former Persia and they took, they actually made this beautiful Islamo Turkic Indian civilization which you can see as the culmination of the Taj Mahal. And then the Arabs, the Berbers had a hold on Spain and the Maghreb and Egypt. And then the Turks had a hold on all of the Asian possessions. So the Arabs and the Persians had been so domesticated by empire that they've been conquered by more Barbarian peoples like the Berbers of the Turks.

[Austin Padgett]

It's interesting that Egypt was ruled from 500 to 1950 from Tunisia. It makes me feel a little bit better for Carthage. You know, they got the win in the end.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They were ruled by Tunisia from 900 to 1150. They 500, 525, 21 BC to 333 was Persian governance. 333. That's not the actual date. I'm giving approximate dates to 30 BC was under Greek governance. 30 BC until 633 was Roman and later Byzantine Greek governance. 633 to the late 7th century. No, it has to be early 8th. Then you had the Arab Umayyads. Then you had the originally ethnically Persian Abbasids who later got mixed in ethnically from the 8th century until 1 of the local governors declared himself independent under the Telunids, I believe. Then the Fatimids conquered the Telunids. They were from Tunisia. I think Tulun was a Central Asian general. I'd have to check that. Or Persian after the Fatimids were the Ayyubids in the late 12th century who were ethnic Kurds. Early 13th century until the 16th century were Mamelukes, who in Egypt were predominantly Circassian Caucasians and Ukrainian pechenegs peoples. Early 16th century until the 20th century it was still the Mamluks with the Turks on top. And they recruited a lot of Albanians. Where the ruler of Egypt in the early 19th century was Muhammad Ali, who was an ethnic Albanian. And the nobility of Egypt were called the Turks at the time. Then it was the British from the 1880s until the 1950s who were ruling on top of the Mamluks and the Turks. Then Nasser in the nineteen nineteen fifty ish got independence.

[Austin Padgett]

Wow. Yeah. So, I mean, Egypt really hasn't been ruling itself since the pyramid guys fell.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. So that was mentally taxing. But I did it. Crusader states established. So because this is the Middle Ages when governments were quite weak, there wasn't a single Crusader country. You had five different Crusader states. I think you had the county of Edessa at the top, which was in Lesser Armenia. In modern Turkey, you had the Principality of Antioch based out of Syria. The strongest place for the Crusaders was around modern Lebanon, I think Acre and another place were independent city states. Then you had the Kingdom of Jerusalem around modern Israel. And so there was this agglomeration of Christian kingdoms which ruled the Middle east from the 1090s until Saladin started really destroying them in the mid to late 12th century. And the Reason the Crusader states worked well was the Muslim world was divided and they frankly did not value the Levant. The Muslim world was a general. The Levant was a pretty wealthy and advanced place, but it was not the most important place in the Muslim world, Iraq or Egypt. In Spain they lost Spain cries being some hubs. And. And so when the Muslims were doing their own thing, the Christians could hold on to the Levant. What really did the Christians in was getting attacked on two fronts by the Muslims. Where the Muslims under the Zingid dynasty, which will we should probably get to them now actually after the Crusader stuff, the Zengids who were first Turks and then the Ayyubids who were Kurds, were able to unify Syria and Egypt. So they were attacking the Crusader states on two axes, which they fundamentally could not recover from. And there were several other like issues of luck and lock last lack of will in Europe. But I mean, it's one of those things where it's truly remarkable that the Crusader states ever existed. It's remarkable. There's a place called the county of Odessa, a Crusader county in the Middle east. And you'll notice strange things where for example, there's a Montreal in Israel Mountain Royal Mountain, and there's also a Philadelphia in Israel, by the way, that was a Roman city, though I think it died out by this point. And the Crusaders were concentrated around the coast. Modern Gaza or Ascalon was actually an important Crusader center. They were around Jaffa was their most important city or modern Tel Aviv. And the Crusaders existed as this nobility on top of the population, using the local Christians and the Muslims, where they recruited a lot of locals for their armies. Especially they had a unit called the Turcopols, which come up in Medieval 2 Total War a lot great game. Or the Turcopols were Turks who they recruited to fight for them. And they formed this colonial population. And the best book on the Crusades is the one written by Thomas Asbridge. And he talks about how over time there was this cultural trend that the Crusaders who lived in the Middle east would acclimate to the conditions there after you spent decades in the Middle east, because most of the people who went on the Crusade went back to Europe. It took a certain kind of person to stay in the Middle east and they became quite accepting of local culture. It was completely normal to have Middle Eastern or Middle Eastern or Islamic or Jewish or local Christian friends where there was a lot of socializing. And over time the Crusaders built up these sorts of relationships and understandings with the locals. Where, for example, Damascus was an ally of the Crusaders consistently. And so the Crusader kingdoms acclimated to the culture. And this was a big part of the cultural transmission which occurred with the Crusades. But you had waves of Crusaders who kept coming in. And each wave of Crusader were these guys straight out of Europe. They had never met a Muslim. They think they're demons, they want to get the Pope's approval to get absolved of their sins, because you had to kill him as a Muslim to get absolved of your sins. And so they were looking for that. And they kept on causing issues for the Crusader states where both the Muslims and the Christians had an issue, where they had these moderates were willing to deal with the other. But the moderates kept on getting pushed by the radicals who kept on trying to do insane stuff. So a lot of Crusader diplomacy is each side alternating power or trying to control their own radicals to not blow up the situation. But the issue is that in this society's moral code, the radicals were in the moral right. So the radicals could consistently win arguments against the moderates because their moral code was their moral code is kind of the opposite of ours, actually. No, we have the same issue.

[Austin Padgett]

But yes, yeah, it sounds like the problem in the Middle east right now with the Sharia law, doctrinal stuff, because they're. They can always claim to be making a more direct peel appeal to the religion. Yes, it's tricky. And then like Israeli kind of sounds French and France is huge and French is huge in Turkey. Does that have any connection to like the French legacy in the Crusades or is that totally later related to like Napoleonic and colonial politics? Probably.

[Rudyard Lynch]

First of all, I just. First of all, I dispute that Israeli sounds like French. And your second point was French influence in Turkey.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, there's a lot of French language in Turkey. It was the language.

[Rudyard Lynch]

First of all, French was just the most important culture in the early modern period. But secondly, the French and the Ottoman Turks were consistently allies across the early modern world from like the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. The French and the Turks were allies because they had the shared ally of the Spanish who dominated the Mediterranean with Italy and Spain and Portugal. And so there was a certain degree of cultural influence just because they were long standing allies. It's interesting. I am. This is a weird thing to remember, but I once Richard Hanania showed his genetics and he's Jordanian and Palestinian Christian and he's 10% French and German ancestry. And I saw that and I said crusader, because if you're local population, you have that ancestry, it makes total Sense, and they didn't bring that many women. So the local Crusader men, if they wanted to mate, they'd have to marry in with the local women. The Crusaders were not markedly. The Crusaders were not markedly more oppressive to the local population. If you lived in, in the Crusader states, there were a few annoyances. But if you were a Muslim peasant, your life did not change markedly. I've read conflicting reports where some historians say that it caused economic degradation. Other historians say that the Crusaders improved the society and the economy. But the Crusaders had to operate inside this Muslim and Jewish frame. And so when we see the Crusaders as these insane radicals who just wanted to destroy. No, they were operating in these majority non Catholic spaces where they developed all these sorts of rituals and understandings and that stuff. Where you'll hear stories of knights, there's, you'll read primary sources of knights being friends with Jewish doctors or there was this attitude that in the time that, like that being upper class transcended national boundaries, that a Muslim and a Christian gentleman, both through understanding class, were capable of communicating. And so when you look at the Third Crusade as an example, Richard Lionheart and Saladin had a sort of bromance, even though they were fighting where Richard Lionheart was sick, and then Saladin sent him an icebox and some, some nice drinks to say, I'm sorry, you're a sick man. And they would just commune and show their immense mutual respect for each other as men, even though they were fighting. And so there are these multiple points in the Third Crusade where they basically show deference and respect to the other. And the Crusades had a big impact on Europe for several reasons. First of all, it hooked Europe up with the Middle east and that was done largely through Italy. If anyone benefited from the Crusades, it was Italy, because Western Europe didn't have the ships or the commerce or the organizational ability to basically fund and ship the scale of an operation. The Crusades were. These were often armies of tens of thousands of men sailing thousands of miles in Italy was the most advanced place in Western Europe. The Italians did have that and they were long standing partners with the Muslim world in all kinds of trade. Where Venice was more so in the trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, Genoa was more so with the Western Mediterranean. But the Italians imported the stock market and banking and all of these economic institutions from the Muslim world. And then the Italians then spread capitalism to the rest of Christendom. And the Italians really did well out of this, where the Venetians, which we'll talk about later, they built out their own Colonial empire involving the coast of Croatia and Crete and Euboea, the island off Athens and Constantinople and Crimea. I'm getting into spoilers, though, but the Italians would build out these colonial empires where the Genoese had colonies in Crimea and along the coast. And the Italians were able to use the Crusades to take over the entire Mediterranean's trade in the year 1000. The Mediterranean's trade was developed by the Muslims, but it was controlled by the Muslims. By the time you get to 1100 or 1200, partly as a side effect of the Norman takeover of Sicily, the Italians had complete dominance over the Mediterranean's trade. Egypt was an economic colony of Italy, Syria was an economic colony of Italy. And there's a few other points, but do you want to say anything about how the Italians did really well in this? Sure.

[Austin Padgett]

Dominating the Mediterranean seems really important.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Because you had the Islamic ones doing it, you know, Rome before that, and then when Italy was doing it, you have the Renaissance. And then when Spain was doing it, Italy was just completely shut down. So if you're on the Mediterranean and you don't control it, you can have some problems.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That's a really good point. When Britain controlled the Mediterranean, it controlled the world. I frequently think how strange it is that Britain had a stranglehold on the Mediterranean in the 18th through the 19th centuries, because there's lots of industrialized, advanced countries that hug the Mediterranean. That should have kicked Britain out. And Britain isn't even close to the Mediterranean. It's really a sign of how powerful Britain was in that era. But it's treated.

[Austin Padgett]

Sorry, navy maxing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly. And so the shift of Mediterranean dominance from the Christian, from the Muslims to the Christians is treated as a civilizational turning point by a lot of historians, including Fernand Braudel, where that was the tipping point, where 1000 AD is when the west started to rise and Islam started to stagnate. That's true of across the Asian civilizations. 1000 AD is when China, India, Islam started to stagnate and the west started to rise. But other side effects of the Crusades are partly the return of classical knowledge to Europe, where 12th century Europe experienced a philosophic and scientific renaissance, which we've really forgotten. But I've said before about how ideas of modern Renaissance thinking, studying the classics, studying like more advanced forms of Oriental mysticism, studying medicine, came from the Muslim world. And European thinkers would pretend to have Arabic names in the 12th century to make themselves sound more trustworthy, because the Arabs were seen as having such a leg up in intellectual stuff. That Europeans, there were entire universities in Europe which basically marketed themselves as we just give you stuff straight from the Arab world. But the Christians were really quick to pick up on this. They were able to master the classics and logic and science and philosophy by the 13th century. So the Europeans, once you gave them this knowledge, almost immediately picked up on it. You had thinkers like Abelard in 11th century Brittany who were already doing all this stuff. Abelard was using the rational method to critique religion at the time of the first Crusades. And then you also saw the commercial revolution in Europe, as we said before. And people do overemphasize the importance of the Crusades intellectually because the place where the most of these classical documents from the Greeks and the Romans, which later influenced the west so much, the biggest source was actually the Byzantine Empire and Spain was also a big source. So the Crusades were part of it, but they weren't the biggest part. But the Crusades also brought Europeans into proximity with very old ideas where, as an example, heresy spread across Europe as a side effect of the Crusades, partly because as the Christians started to lose, it made people question whether the Catholic Church was the one true way. Because if we're losing our fight over the Holy Land. But also it introduced them to very old ideas like Gnosticism or Catharism, which became this huge heresy in early 13th century France, which was genocided out of existence. And then you had these other heresies like the Waldensians or nearly the Franciscans that the Catholic Church chose to take the Franciscans in, which saved them. But these were all caused by contact with the Islamic world where you had these vastly older ideas. And it made people question the Catholic Church's complete monopoly on their collective unconscious. Where by the time you're getting to the 13th and the 14th centuries, you have mass distrust of the Catholic Church across society. And that couldn't have happened without the Crusades, at least not in the same way.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. Because they're seen as managing it and it's ultimately unsuccessful. So that's. Yeah. And the Church should never be unsuccessful because God's supposed to be correct.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. It's part of this disturbance of the Catholic feudal hierarchy, where the European High Middle Ages, sort of the. These institutions like a very strict Catholic Church. I don't want to use the word strict. It was a very dogmatic Catholic Church, a feudal nobility based around ties of hierarchy and courage, then a serfdom. But then over the course of the high medieval period, all three of those institutions broke down due to the rise of Capitalism and the scientific mind and that stuff which created modernity. And the Crusades is the start of that gradual process. Although by the time the end of the Crusades in the 1290s, it was. We're still deep in the high Middle Ages. But as an example, the Black Death spread to Europe in the 14th century due to the Mongols fight the Mongols besieging Italian colonies in Crimea or modern Ukraine, lobbing dead corpses into the Italian walls. Then within a matter of weeks, it spreads to Europe, because the trade system is that strong. That's the world built by the Crusades. And it went to Italy first. Actually, the Black Death went to Italy, not anywhere else, because the trade routes flew to Italy.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. So just a little bit of conquest. You know, you get into Constantinople and Levant. It's not that far away from Europe, but then it connects you. It plugs you into the rest of the entire world.

[Rudyard Lynch]

There's this school of historians who try to look for the origins of European colonialism in the modern period in the Crusades, basically using the Crusades as a test case of. A test case of European colonialism before the rest. And I think there's some validity to it, because as an example, the Crusader states saw they had the most centralized government of any European country. Because when it's just like Lord Baldwin of Jerusalem with his buddies, the Christians have to hold together so they make a more united government. So the Kingdom of Jerusalem was actually a model for later European political centralization.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. So which is kind of what I was talking about, how the relationships formed in the Middle east had political implications back home. Like, yes, the royalty in Scotland and England got along and thought that they could trust each other. And then it turned out into like the regular domestic politics blew it up. Maybe that happened in other places too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

I was thinking the colonialism trend was very similar with where you'd have people like, trying to start their own countries or becoming a governor, or like Cortez, if he wasn't so loyal to the Crown. Sounds similar to the Crusader kings, like stopping and claiming a city, Right?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. This is the feudal equivalent of VC Capital, where I say that European colonialism was made by VC Capital because it was the East India Company, Jamestown, it was these joint stock companies doing the endeavor for profit, raised by private capital. The earlier Crusades were also private capital. It's just. It was the nobility doing it. And then later Crusades were militarized and were more militarized and nationalized. But this is a great transition to the Second Crusade. I can't Believe we're covering the actual Crusades this late. But the Second Crusade was, that was due to the rise of the Zengid and later Ayyubid monarchy where the Zengids were Turkish leaders in northern Iraq and Syria, where the area of eastern Syria and northern Iraq were kind of wedded together. I think it might. That area might have been potentially the wealthiest place in the Muslim world. And it was under this Turkish dynasty where Zengid and first Nour Ad Din were trying to take the northern front against the Crusade. The Crusaders by Antioch and Odessa. And they were religious fundamentalists. They were seen as hardcore by the Muslim standards of that era. And they fought really well. They actually wiped out Odessa and they, they went down towards Antioch. And then the Second Crusade was the one with the horns of Hattin, I believe. And the major issue that the Crusaders ran into was the Zengids were able to create a joint monarchy. So Zengid lost power and Norad Din, I think Norad Dean took Antioch. I'd have to look that up. I'm sorry, this is, this is such a complex topic. I. I have to do fact checking.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, you're calling up a ridiculous amount of references.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Thanks.

[Austin Padgett]

I was gonna. Yeah, go ahead.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So the Ayyubids were ethnic Kurds. And due to a dynastic issue in the Fatimid dynasty in the royal court, the young Saladin, I believe was sent by Nur Ad Din to take Egypt as a teenager. He did so, became Lord of Egypt. They were in a joint monarchy together. Then Saladin. There was a palace coup that caused Saladin to become Lord of both Syria through Jordan. I think he even took Mecca as well as Egypt. This created a two sided pressure against the surviving Crusader states. And this was the thing started to really hurt the Crusaders where Saladin was seen as one of the greatest leaders of medieval history. He was widely loved, even by Christians. Christians would write romance fanfic about Saladin really being a Christian and actually being a noble knight who would seduce Christian ladies. Courtly love is a theme we're going to explore. And so Saladin was widely respected. He was a great commander. He did a lot of nation building. He was widely understood to be humane and moral and all those traits at the time. He was also a great commander. And Saladin was the singular man who caused the Christians the most suffering.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And he even beat Orlando Bloom.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Is that a movie?

[Austin Padgett]

Kingdom of Heaven. Which I thought about when you mentioned like the debates about the Crusaders improving things because Orlando Bloom's character dug a bunch of irrigation ditches in the movie.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So I haven't watched that movie. It was before my time. It has a pretty good, interesting rendition of Baldwin. Baldwin, the King of Jerusalem was, I believe, a leper or he had another skin disorder. And so he wore this iron mask. And so the King of Jerusalem, he would guide them with this iron mask where you could never see him's face. And that's pretty metal. That's like a warhammer plot line. So Norah Din attacked Antioch a lot and.

[Austin Padgett]

Huh.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, I'm going to say he took Antioch. Wait, no, I must find the truth. Wait, so I was correct. He conquered. He also got Egypt through teenage Saladin. So Second Crusade was caused by the Horns of Hattin, where Saladin pulled. No, fuck me. Okay. Second Crusade Horns of Hattin is has to be after the Second Crusade, because the Second Crusade was Louis and Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, where I believe they fought over Antioch. The Pope called this Crusade. And there's a funny subplot here where Eleanor of Aquitaine, she was the Duchess of Aquitaine, the wealthiest region in France, in the southwest, a center of courtly love. Her court was a center of culture. She married the King of France, and he was named Louis, like all the kings of France. And he was a very monastic, very devout fellow. And he refused to sleep with his wife, and the Pope ordered him to sleep with his wife to maintain the French line. And yet he was still kind of curmudgeonally about it. And so he went on Crusade to fight with the Pope. And what happened is that Eleanor of Aquitaine cheated on him with another of the Norman commanders there. And then she married the King of England, which switched Aquitaine over from a French to an English possession.

[Austin Padgett]

Huh.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Nora Dean did not take Antioch. So the Second Crusade was largely unsuccessful because it was incapable of pushing the Muslims back from the coastline. They fought over Antioch and the coast. And Saladin's great defeat of the Crusader army was at the Horns of Hattin, where he pulled them out into the desert to the east of Palestine, because the Crusaders could consistently win when they were going to fight the Muslims directly. So the Muslims found various tactics to get around this, one of which was pulling them out into the desert, where he isolated them in this sort of mountain outcrop without a source of water. When the Crusaders didn't have a source of water for day started to go crazy. And with their honor code, they just thought it was better to die heroically than to live intolerably in this heat. So they started charging across the desert to get to Saladin's formation, and then Saladin just slaughtered them because he was in the advantageous position. This played into all of the Muslim strategic advantages. This killed most of the Night Corps that the Crusader estates had. So they were always on the defensive after that. So Hattin allowed Saladin to take Jerusalem and to wipe out most of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, shoving the Crusaders up against the coast where Nur Ad Din nearly took Palestine. But from this period onward, with Hattin at 11:87, the Crusaders were just stuck on the coastline and they were incapable of pushing back this point. It was basically a done deal between the Muslims and the Crusaders. Each of the Crusades afterwards, we're just trying to replicate it. The.

[Austin Padgett]

And when this battle happens in the movie, it actually speaks to your point earlier about the moderates struggling to control the new waves of Crusaders who were looking very specifically to, you know, kill and get glory. Because it was the. The radicals pushing them out. The plot was the radicals pushing them into this really stupid situation because of.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That impetus in, I believe, the Second Crusade. I'm sorry, I'm getting the chronology wrong. Damascus was the only major Crusader ally state, the only major Islamic Crusader ally state. And the Crusaders decided to attack Damascus because it was the closest target. And one of the biggest issues the Crusaders kept running into was because Europe was such a decentralized society and it was such a masculine, honor based, aristocratic society, the Crusaders could never develop coherent, singular leadership because all of these noblemen were jockeying for the best position.

[Austin Padgett]

Moderates could not even control their own side in the negotiations.

[Rudyard Lynch]

One time I was going to a water park with 10 CEOs, and it was a nightmare because they all walked off in their own direction and we didn't have phones at the water park. So I'm thinking this water park is probably dozens of acres. If we don't see each other, I will never see any of you again. And there's nobody to coordinate. But they wouldn't stay as a single group because it hurt their egos too much. This is like the Crusades, and it becomes a progressively greater issue the longer the Crusades go on, where the Crusaders attack their one ally state, which then helped unify the Muslim world's public opinion against the Crusaders because the Crusaders were seen as unreasonable. And then this backfired.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, you can't be seen as unreasonable or unreasonable because every single sort of diplomacy breaks down.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The law of chill vibes always holds. The law of chill vibes is be as chill as possible in any given situation. And until you don't but that's a different context.

[Austin Padgett]

That's why my collar's up.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. You're very edgy. Third Crusade. This is the Crusade of Kings. And this is where most histories of the Crusade stop. But no, we're going to keep going till the end. And Third Crusade was called the Crusade of Kings, because this was after the period when the European monarchies had fully formed, where England was a unified country that had half of France. France was a unified country. They were still the size of Delaware, but they had the best king in French history, that being Philip Augustus. And they would later, within the next generation, conquer everything from the English Channel to the Mediterranean. Then you had the German Empire, which was unified at this point of the Holy Roman Empire. They had Germany, Netherlands, most of Belgium, eastern third of France, most of Italy, including the South. No, not the south yet. Austria, Slovenia, Czechia, Switzerland, etc. And so this Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of Germany, Philip Augustus, France, Richard Lionheart. And Richard Lionheart was remembered quite well for all of history until recently, where revisionist historians have tried to make him look bad because he spent his entire career crusading, and very little of it in England, which I think is a skill issue. But then they've tried to make John Lackland good, and Lackland is the singular worst king in English history, without a single competitor afterwards. It's just completely unreasonable to make John Lackland good. And getting these three kings together was an issue where the Pope had to actively coordinate the King of England and the King of France working together, because they were both scheming on each other. So the King of the Pope had to sit both of them down, say, you're both going to go on Crusade at the same time. Then the Pope had to give an exact day limit that they had to go on Crusade for. And Philip Augustus the second, the day limit was over without even taking Jerusalem. He just went back then, started scheming, and the Pope said, I will excommunicate you if you fight England when the King of England is at home is away. Philip Augustus followed that till a certain point they just said, snapped and broke it, and then took Northern France.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. And then he's like, what are you going to do about it? Basically.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly.

[Austin Padgett]

King Richard the Lionheart was actually super committed to the Crusade. So we talk about John Lachlan in one of our English history videos and you do get a sense of like, oh, Richard Lionheart is messing up, because there's all this terrible stuff going on in England. They're losing their competition to France he's focused on this other area. And he was just really into the Crusades.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He was captured by the Austrian duke. So he went on crusade. He let John Lackland act as his regent. And this is the backstory for Robin Hood. Robin Hood is set in the several year period. So he put Longchamp as his regent. John deplaced Longchamp. The plot of King Arthur is that Robin Hood is supporting Richard Lionheart in a long shop, and he's stopping the repression of Nottingham by John. By John Lackland's lackeys, because John Lacklan had a highly oppressive governance which created the Magna Carta as a reaction against it. And so the guy who Richard Lionheart put in charge got kicked out. And then on his return from Crusade, he was captured in Austria for years. And the Lord of Austria demanded this huge payment from England in order to let him out. And there's the romantic story of Richard Lionheart's bard walking across Germany singing Richard Lionheart's favorite song. And then he hears the song and Richard sings back. And that's probably not true, but it's still a good story.

[Austin Padgett]

And like Richard Lionheart kind of being a beloved or respected figure through. Even through his occupation or throughout Europe broadly. Probably because he actually did sacrifice his internal interest for the glory of the Crusades.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Third Crusade. It's an oceanic Crusade. Another interesting story is Richard Lionheart was walking through Navarre. And so this is either a. You guys should factor. If the story is actually true, it could be apocryphal. He wandered through Navarre and he just saw the daughter of the king of Navarre. And he said, I like, she is so beautiful. I want her. And they just established like a concubinage relationship like that. Then he took over. I forget if they got married. And then he also just conquered Cyprus on a whim. And there's another story with like the monarchy in the royal family of Cyprus. I forget.

[Austin Padgett]

Sounds like he was just having a good time.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He was, yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

And the Robin Hood character comes from the Crusades. Right. So he's like, in that story, there's a nobility attached to. To the people fighting in the Crusades versus the people.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. He married her. Okay. Right. I was correct. He married her. But yeah. So Richard Lionheart is one of the least historically easy to mediate figures because he totally could have existed. But trying to get records on random bandits in 12th century England is pretty hard. People have tried to do it. There's like various records of someone who he could be, but we don't really know. There's Multiple canon myths where it's just an English folk tale that developed. So in certain canon myths, he's a crusader, in others, he's. In all the myths, he's an earl or a nobleman who goes forest to help the public. But Third Crusade was done by water. Like the Second Crusade was mostly done by water with the French armies. The German armies were by land, walking over the continent through Hungary. So Third Crusade is they attack Jaffa, and the Muslims had taken Jaffa, which was Tel Aviv, which is the big port city in modern Israel. And the Crusaders had this horrible. No, sorry, Third Crusades. Acre, which is right next. It's close to Jaffa. The siege of Acre was brutal and it would require these very strange military contraptions where they'd build these huge towers and mount them. And there was a naval component because Acre is a port city, so the Crusaders were besieging it by the ocean. And they finally did take Acre and Richard Lionheart would march down Israel, where he would face Saladin in these sort of engagements where the. The. The Muslims had an advantage in horse cavalry. So they try to basically waylay and hurt the Crusaders so that they wouldn't be able to basically to fight, but then the Crusaders had to keep going. And so you had several situations where, as an example, Richard Lionheart had to. Or not he didn't have to. He just butchered a bunch of Muslim prisoners of war. And that was not acceptable in the social context of medieval warfare. It was a huge publicity issue back in Europe, where Even in the 12th century, you had codes of politeness and codes of war and what was considered to be acceptable war, which Richard Lionheart did break.

[Austin Padgett]

And would the Muslims have those same codes around prisoners?

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Muslims had their own codes, but they were distinct. And you were allowed more latitude with atrocities with Muslims or Christians, but there were still generally acceptable bounds, and those grew over time.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. I was just wondering if there's a situation where it's like you're playing into morality that your enemy doesn't share.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Also, different factions of Crusaders were this, to differing degrees. So the Zengids were more brutal. The Mamluks were really brutal. The. The earlier Crusaders were really brutal. And then over time, they. They gradually softened out as they gained a greater comprehension. By the time you get to the Crusades of Frederick ii in the mid 13th century, you just get situations where there have been enough Crusades that you can just have these very clean negotiations without ideology attached.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Because the blueprint's been established.

[Rudyard Lynch]

So Richard Lionheart went down the coast. And he beat a Muslim army at the Battle of Arsuf, where we saw the. The military advantage of the heavy cavalry is able to shatter the Muslim forces. And he kept going south until he hit Jerusalem and he kind of burnt out of steam around Jerusalem. And the issue was that because Philip Augustus sailed back to France, Richard Lionheart did not have just the reinforcements and the supplies to keep going. So he ended up in this sort of situation where he's like on the verge of taking Jerusalem and he just doesn't. He realizes he can't hold this. So it's this sort of Pyrrhic victory of, I know that I can attain this, but there's no way I can hold this, especially with the issues back in England and. And so I'm kind of stuck and I have to head back. And the Third Crusade, although it's a very romantic crusade, one with a lot of good stories, it's also this just fundamentally kind of let down experience for the Christians. And the Muslims did eventually win Third Crusades. It's sort of a draw, but macro strategically. The Muslims definitely ended up with the stronger hand and they pushed the Crusaders back to the coast where the Crusaders were able to hold the. Hold the coastline region across the 13th century, with a handful of cities clustered in Lebanon. I think they held Cyprus for a bit because that was one of Richard's conquests. But from this point onward, it's basically the Muslims grinding down the Christians. So Crusades 4 through 9 are the Christian attempt to reconcile this, but at the same time there's a growing boredom with crusading. So you try these different things where a lot of the 4th through 9th Crusades were not actually set in the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade, as an example, which was a real travesty, was due to the. The failure of the Third Crusade. They were launching a new one. But the knights involved and the lords involved were broke, so they couldn't afford to sail to the Holy Land. The Venetians were the ones who could do it, but the Venetians said, if you're not going to pay us, conquer first Zagreb, one of their great rivals in Croatia, and then Constantinople. And if you conquer those cities for us, we'll pay for you to go to Jerusalem. And there's lots of drama on top of this where the Pope did not approve of this. The Pope was vociferously against the Third Crusade. And there's some of the leaders involved, like the French and the German knights. They also had their own debts to pay off and their own infighting inside Europe, where it's just this constellation of negative variables where the Crusaders sailed into Byzantium and took the city. And this is the first time Byzantium had lost in their entire history. They had been able to fight off countless other invasions like the Avars or the Arabs or the Huns or the Goths, the Vikings, the Seljuks and so many others, the Bulgars. And they lost to the Crusaders. And this is a defining historic moment because Byzantium was this bulwark of Christianity against the Muslim world. And the Crusaders, practically, not practically, they did backstab Byzantium as one of the Christian nations in that area. That would have worked well with them. And the fall of Byzantium, which resulted in the rise of these new states, which were partly. You had the Duchy of Athens, which is a Crusader state in Greece. The Venetians took parts of the bottom of Greece and Crete and the islands. Then you had breakaway Byzantine states run by local commanders, like the Empire of Trebizond, which actually lasted longer than Constantinople until the 15th century. Then you have the Empire of Nicaea, which was the main Byzantine breakaway state. Then you had another. You had a few other states around, like Thessalonica and stuff in north Greece. But it caused this breakup of the region, which ultimately hurt it, because this was the glory period of Albania and Serbia, because these small Balkan states, which had been insignificant beforehand, could suddenly get there, get larger empires. So Serbians still look back on the fallout of this period as a historic golden age. And then it caused the rise of the Turks, because the loss of Byzantium meant that there was this power vacuum from these northwest Turkish chieftains who were able to build the Ottoman Turkish state, which would later conquer Byzantium and create an empire that lasted centuries, stretching from Hungary until Somalia and from Algeria to Azerbaijan, where I don't think if the Fourth Crusade had happened, which was seen as a travesty at the time, all Europe was horrified by the Venetian Crusader takeover of Constantinople. I think the Byzantine Empire would still be here and we wouldn't have seen the rise of the Ottoman Turks.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's a real nasty double blow, because everyone thinks about the Byzantines not getting any support, support from Western Europe during the invasions. And sure, maybe it was a sunken cost because they were surrounded, but it wouldn't have taken much to defend the city. The city was very defensible, even with. Even with cannons. And the fact that the Crusaders actually sacked it 100 years before is insane, because it's supposed to be like this Impregnable city. And the first time it was sacked was when it fell is kind of how you think of it. But no, the Crusaders got right over the walls 100 years before. And I'm sure the Turks must have been thinking about that. I wonder if it did anything to the era of invincibility. I know the Turks failed a few times before they got it, so that probably made them doubt. But.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It'S a hard question. I don't really know the answer. The issue the Byzantines ran into was they kept on building centers of power, which they lost. Anatolia was the center of their power. They lost all of that with Manzikert. Then they built out the Balkans, and they spent centuries relocating their Anatolian ruling class to the Balkans. Then the loss of Constantinople in 1204 caused a complete breakdown of that. And so the Byzantines were never able to get their power back together. And if ByZantium was a TV show, the last like three seasons would be super depressing. Constantinople's a single city state or a few other dots around the map. They're treated as this plaything of the Western nations. Where there were Crusader colonies, there were Italian colonies. Byzantium was an economic dependent on Italy. Even for decades before the Fourth Crusade. They actually had these riots and mass genocides of the Italian populations in the Byzantine Empire because the Byzantines grew resentful of their mercantile dominance. And just the Byzantine TV show gets really depressing and you kind of wish it ends faster. You're protracting this process that has to happen until 1453 and Fourth Crusade. The Fifth Crusade was an attempt to figure out the. The Fourth Crusade clearly did not work, and the earlier attacks in the Levant have not worked. So instead let's attack Egypt, where the later Crusades are mostly Egypt. And all of the Egypt Crusades ran into the same issue, where Fifth Crusade is an Egypt Crusade, the Seventh Crusade is an Egypt Crusade, and the Ninth Crusade was an Egypt Crusade. So the Crusaders had stopped trying to attack the Levant directly. Instead, they went through Egypt because the Levant strategy hadn't worked. And Egypt was also a wealthy land that if they seized it, it would. It would really create a bulwark of their power, because the Levant doesn't have enough people to build an independent state, but Egypt does. So their goal is to take Egypt, then take the Levant. And Egypt is fairly easy to conquer, as we've seen from them being ruled by foreign dynasties for 2500 years. Egypt became under the governance of the Mamelukes, who were the. The slave Soldiers from. They were from Circassia, by the way. Circassia has been widely known for millennia as the place in the world with the most beautiful women. And Ukraine and the Pontic grassland. And so the nature of the Mamluk governance was that the second you were born in Egypt, you were a second class citizen and only people straight out of the steps could rule Egypt. So you had these new generations of these steppe barbarians who actually helped bring the Black Death, which kept Egypt's population low, because one of the centers of the Black Death is that area of the Pontic Steppe. And then they were just ruthlessly exploitive to the Egyptians because they had no stake in the land. But at the same time, they were a highly effective military caste, which avoid decadence or degeneracy because they're constantly bringing in new men each generation. Which is why the Mamluks were able to dominate Egypt almost continuously from the 1200s through the 1950s.

[Austin Padgett]

Because the same trend as hard mountain people ruling cities.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Exactly. And one of the issues with all of the Egypt Crusades is that they got the flooding of the Nile wrong multiple times. There's weird dynamics. The Mediterranean you can only sell. You can't really sail the Mediterranean in the winter due to storm issues. And so with the way the patterns sync up there is that every time the Crusaders or most of the times they went to Egypt, they arrived in Egypt during the flood season. And so with two of the Egypt Crusades, they attacked the city of Damietta at the mouth of the Nile, they got flooded, they got stuck at Damietta. Whether or not they took it, then they couldn't move across each other. Egypt. And the other issue is, especially with the way Egypt's terrain is so marshy and difficult to navigate under certain contexts, is that because they could never unify leadership, they always had a leadership crisis where they'd argue over important details and not make a decision. And then the Egyptians wiped them out. The Crusaders, I think, totally could have conquered Egypt, but due to cross crisis issues inside their leadership and with the timing of the flood, they kept on losing.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's crazy how easy things would have been without, like counterproductive infighting. Like, yeah, the Crusaders just stumbling over to Constantinople and like kicking out a little rock, holding back like the entire wall of Muslim invasion on their way to fight Muslims and the Middle East. I was, I'm wondering with the mountain men dynamic, like, when are the like Appalachian mountain men gonna invade and govern New York City as a colony? Like, why hasn't that happened?

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's probably gonna happen 200 years from now. I mean, America's an advanced. We do not know true degeneracy. True degeneracy takes centuries to set in. We haven't had enough time for true degeneracy. But I believe. And so the Sixth Crusade is just a. It's like a law moment where Frederick ii, Emperor of Germany, who was widely known as a heretic and a man of culture and a philosopher and a libertine, he was in a long standing fight with the Pope, which stemmed back centuries between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, which the Pope ultimately won. And Frederick II was one of the last great Holy Roman Emperors, and he was mostly based out of Sicily, so he hung out with a lot of Arabs and Jews and those people. The Pope bullied him to go on Crusade. His reaction was sailing to the Middle east, walking to Jerusalem, making a deal with the local sultanate, where he could have Jerusalem on a technicality, making peace with him, getting the pilgrimage deal, and then sailing back where he did the things the Pope told him to with no fighting, with negotiation. And then he just, like hung out with the Sultan and left. And the Pope.

[Austin Padgett]

Sounds like the best crusade.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I love this. It's a great move. And then the Pope said, no, you have to kill the Muslims. And Henry ii, Frederick II said, I did what you said.

[Austin Padgett]

Right. It's just like prime example of how easy things are when you're reasonable. Because he's like, hey, hey, bro. Hey, Sultan. Yeah, I got this pressure from my boss to do this. You think we could work it out this way? And then, you know, we accomplish all of our goals and we chill out here for a bit. And then they have a party.

[Rudyard Lynch]

If you're against the Sixth Crusade, you're a hater.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. And it was very chill vibes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, exactly. I should also mention the Mongols. So there was a lengthy period from the early 13th to the late 13th century where the Crusader States were just the Levantine coastline. And the Muslims were always on the verge of kicking them out, but they weren't. And so the Mongols showed up from the east and they conquered Iraq, they burnt cities in Syria. And the Mongols were just brutal. They killed a lot of the Middle East's population, ultimately destroying it for centuries. And the Christians initially wanted to ally with the Mongols because they thought they might be Prester John, who was a supposed immortal wizard who ran an empire the size of India in the Orient, who was also Christian. And so much of early modern, the age of exploration, was the goal to reach the immortal Christian wizard of Prester John and the Blue Wizards. Exactly. And it turned out to be Ethiopia, which was not capable of performing the same role because Ethiopia was a little group of Christians cut off from the rest of Christianity by the Muslim world. And so the Christians tried to work with the Mongols. And there was this idea that the. The Mongol Khan was supposed to was about to convert to Christianity because one of his favorite mistresses was a Nestorian Christian. That did not happen. And the Christians later learned to fear the Mongols. But the Mamelukes beat the Mongols in modern Israel at the Battle of Ain Jalut, which is one of the very few battles where the Mongols lost. And this was considered a historic battle because the Mongols were nearly on the verge of taking Egypt. And so this is a widely recorded battle in military histories. And it cemented the Mameluke dominance of both regions. And so, to close out several threads here, I should mention the Knights Templar, who were one of the military monastic organizations operating in the Levant. And the Levant was called out or overseas in French or the major language of Outremer was French, because that was the plurality origin of the plurality language of the Christians, where the Muslims referred to them as the Franks or the Ferengi. And then they were also called the Latins because they spoke Latin. And they were the Latin Catholic Church. And so the two languages that they used were French and Latin. The Knights Templars were an organization that was developed in the Crusader states in order to make up for the difficulty of staffing the region militarily. It was hard to get European nobility to settle down in the regions. They would recruit these warrior monks to defend the Crusader states. And the Crusader States had the best castles in the world, where they would take the Muslim techniques, ship them over to Europe and then perfect them with European methods. With Claque de Chevalier being one of the, probably the best castle in the world. It was, I think it was a fortification for ISIS or one of those terrorist organizations. In a recent war, the Knights Templar became a transnational organization. And they were invented by Hugh de Payon from Anjou, and they were actually one of the developers of banking because they established checks in European markets, where when you sign a check, there's this assessment that if I sign this, it's representative of some underlying money. I send you the check and I can cash money at the end. This starts with the Templars because there had to be a way to ship money from Europe to Outremer without all the issues of actually shipping the gold. So this is the origin of cashing a check with the Templars saying you put your money in Europe, you bring the check, you can take out money in Outremer. That's the origin of the bank check. And the Templars became stunningly wealthy and they had these secret rituals involving various occult things and they owned a tremendous amount of wealth inside Europe. The Templars were ultimately destroyed due to an alliance of the early 14th century French kings with the Pope, where the French king wanted to take all their possessions because he was broke. This was occurring at the exact same time as the mass eviction of Jews from medieval Europe because the monarchies of Europe were broke. So they were looking for scapegoats to take their money to fund them, which include both the Templars and the Jews. I haven't actually seen that much evidence for misconduct on the part of the Templars.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's, it's classic scapegoat time because you have to find an excuse for the failures. So. But the Templars are really interesting because like what kind of social organization would they have developed into if the French didn't kill them? Because they were like a private.

[Rudyard Lynch]

What, the Masons.

[Austin Padgett]

The Masons. Okay. Yeah. I was thinking like a private network state thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The Masons, but base.

[Austin Padgett]

That'll do. That's pretty cool. So they can build stuff too.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Another of the orders involved were the Knights Hospitallers, who were the. They were the hospitals in the Crusades and they had their own trajectory after the fall of the Crusader states. They went to first Hungary to fight the Pechenegs and the Cumans. Then they formed their own independent state in the Baltics. That being the Knights, the Teutonic Knights. I talk about them in the Holy Roman Empire video. And I was always disappointed growing up that crusader histories of the Crusades never talk about the knights, the Teutonic Knights. But I'm going to continue that cliche here because I frankly don't have the mental energy to cover the Teutonic Knights. So there was a crusade against Tunisia with Louis xii, who was a French king who is widely loved for being a saint. That failed. Louis XII was also part of the failed crusade against Egypt. I think that would have to be the eighth Crusade. And so that's all the Crusades. The Mameluke started to roll back the Christians in the late 1200s, burning all the major cities. And so in 1291, the last Crusader castle at the edge of Lebanon was defeated. And I find it remarkable the Crusades lasted that long. Where small group of Europeans conquered into the Orient they held it for 200 years. And I find it remarkable it's that late because the world of 1291 is not the world of 1090. And so I'm shocked that this last European castle survived so long.

[Austin Padgett]

This is. Is this the one that was used by isis?

[Rudyard Lynch]

No, that's Crack de Chevalier's interior. I believe this is. It's one of those cities on the Lebanese coast. It might be Tripoli. There's an issue where there's a Tripoli in Lebanon and there's also a Tripoli in Libya, so people confuse them.

[Austin Padgett]

The crusader castles are beautiful. It is really interesting comparing the Levine 1200 versus I was incorrect. Yeah, they've got a beautiful cathedral there. But yeah, it's just crazy to think of how developed these cities were a thousand years ago versus 200 years ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly, because it's so close to everything too.

[Austin Padgett]

Like, why would no one fill in that space? Well, we know the Mamelukes, so life.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Doesn'T really make sense. Things just kind of happen. And progress only occurs when you make things happen. Progress doesn't just occur. Look at the Muslim world as an example. In the 20th century, the Muslim. In the 19th century, the Muslim world was not noticeably more advanced than it was in the 12th. You look at European history, it's the opposite trajectory. But that was because the Europeans really got something right. It wasn't that, because as time passes, things get. As time passes, things tend to holistically get more complex. That's how we evolved upwards from cellular life forms. But over the, over the course of a humanly comprehensible amount of time, like a thousand years, things do not have to get better.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah. Nothing is inevitable and if things go wrong, it's always somebody else's fault. Yeah, I was, I was writing about that today. I was laughing because like a lot of people were talking about how Hitler was like under attack from international bankers or whatever, but his whole economic plan was domestic debt that had like a five year window. And then at the end of that, everyone was rationing and he was like, oh, what do I do now?

[Rudyard Lynch]

You sent me Grox. You sent me Grox. Answer on the effects of Nazi Germany on the German nation and the economy. And I was quite proud of Grok. I thought Grok did a great job.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I was grokking today. It gets the Slavs too, in his plan there.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah. Well, this was mentally exhausting. Like we're. This is like. This is like the limit of what I can mentally do in a two hour period. Next episode is the history of Sex.

[Austin Padgett]

All right, Big, Big. A little bit different, but yeah, you. You pulled up a ridiculous amount of references. You just wrote a book.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I want to do the history of mysticism and the history of sex as episodic examples of certain things over history because We've covered over 50 distinct historic events. So if we start doing it like, let's say I want to cover the history of capitalism or the history of more thematic questions or power rather than just an individual topic.

[Austin Padgett]

I like that. It's fun because then you can bounce through different periods and make connections.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Okay, well, sounds good, man. I'll catch you next week.

[Austin Padgett]

Catch you later.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Bye.

[Whatifalth]

History102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you liked the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.