The Real History Of The Crusades - Myths, Motivations And Modern Impact

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. History, our song, this part of the history of our country, all of our God. Dan Jones, thank you very much for coming back on the show. It's a big subject. One of the biggest. When you set out to write about the crusades, are you mindful of what they mean to people today? This is not just a kind of abstract sort of self-contained bit of medieval history. I'm always interested in topics that can draw like the middle ages together with the modern. So things that people will have heard of. And I think crusades is one of those terms that's bled into our vocabulary today. So while I've been writing, I've had a Google alert for crusades. And every day it comes up with some really amazing stuff. You know, you get political stuff like Boris Johnson is on a crusade to hire more police officers or whatever. The Chinese are on a crusade to destroy the American economy or whatever it may be. One came through this week from a website which said, Dr. Jen Gunter is on a crusade to save your vagina. And I mean, that is not an appropriate mental image. But so it shows you the way that crusades is bled into our language. It also has less humorous political implications and uses. So the alt-right, we know the crusades is absolute catnip for the alt-right. And if you look at, for example, the manifesto of the guy who shot up the mosques in Christchurch earlier this year, full of crusades references, adorbed crusader battles all over the weapons he was using. The manifesto said things like, what would Pope Urban II do? And on the other side, if you like, when ISIS-affiliated groups bombed hotels and churches in Sri Lanka this Easter, again, you know, the statements taking credit for it said things like, we've attacked citizens of the crusader coalition on their infidel holiday. So what that says to you is that there are people in this world who believe that, in some sense, the crusades are still continuing. And for that reason, if none other, I think it's worth considering and writing about what the crusades were really about. Partly so we can understand the difference between the history and what's happening today. And partly so we can see that this is really something that doesn't bear repeating. What do people mean by the crusades? Well, if you've been around at the time of the crusades, so what we're talking about now, roughly speaking, is from the end of the 11th century, 1090s, you could date it earlier to 1060s, as I do in the book, through to, I finish a story in 1492, in the 15th century. Nobody at that time was talking about going on crusades. It's quite a historian's term. However, they knew very well what a crusader was. So a crusader was somebody who'd responded to the call of the papacy, the call of a pope to go and fight a holy war in the name of Christ against the enemies of the church. Now, at the beginning of the period, that meant, in the case of the first crusade, marching overland from Western Europe to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, to assist the Byzantine emperor there in his war against the Turks, who were dismembering peace by peace Byzantine territories in Asia Minor, and then marching on to Jerusalem to, quote-unquote, liberate Jerusalem from Islamic rule. That's the sort of centrepiece of the crusades. Jerusalem was taken in 1099. A series of crusader states were set up in what's now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. But there were other crusading arenas as well. So there were holy wars being fought between Christian powers and Islamic powers in modern Spain and Portugal. There were wars being fought against pagans in the Baltic. There was the Arbjentian crusade against Cathar heretics in southern France. There were wars fought in Egypt, in North Africa. Eventually, by the time you get towards the high Middle Ages and end of the Middle Ages, there are wars being fought between rival Christian powers all over Europe that are being called crusades. You could sort of just have your war rubber stamped as a crusade. And that gave it some spiritual legitimacy or apparent validity that it might otherwise have lacked. So the idea of the crusades, in short, I guess, is about fighting the perceived enemies of the church. What was clearer was what a crusader was. Now, if you agreed to join in one of these wars, whichever it might be, you took a formal vow that you were going to go on a crusade. Your reward for doing so was remission of sins. In other words, all the sins that you committed on earth, if you confessed them, then by going on a crusade or going to fight for the church, you would be excused those sins. So your passage to heaven would be made much speedier than it would have been otherwise. You were marked out as a crusader by having sewn or pinned onto your clothes a cross made of cloth. Or in some cases, if you're feeling pretty extremely bad, you might decide to carve the cross into your forehead or brand it on your skin. These were all sort of possibilities. But the idea is, in Latin the word crusa signati, one signed with the cross. And everybody knew what a crusader looked like. They didn't all look the same. Our image today is a Templar knight usually when we think about crusaders. That's not, we've been talking a bit about this, but that's not at all what all crusaders look like. However, it was pretty obvious to anyone at the time who was a crusader. Why does crusading happen? Why does it start? As usual, you're asking the simple questions, but they are the most complex answers. So if you want to, usually when people tell the story of the crusades, they start with Pope Urban II at Clermont in France, 1095. And he just apparently out of nowhere stands up and says, right, lads, I've got an idea. We're going to head to Constantinople and Jerusalem, liberate Constantinople, liberate Jerusalem, and the reward will be remission of sins. You'll find it in heaven. And often that seems very weird and seems to be just an illustration of how bizarre medieval people were. Actually, of course, if you look at the history of crusading, you see something rather different. During the 1060s, 1070s, 1080s, a lot of different sort of political and militaries and theological strands all sort of coalesced and came together. It was undoubtedly true that the Byzantine Empire was under threat from Turkic warlords pushing westwards through Asia Minor. The Byzantine Emperor had, or a succession of emperors, had made appeals to the West, to Christians of the West saying, come and help us. There was also the fact that there was a schism between the Eastern and Western churches, and a succession of popes had scratched their heads over ways that this schism was falling out could be fixed, could be reconciled. In Western Europe, within Western Christendom, there was similarly a long history of political tension between popes on the one hand and secular rulers, particularly German emperors on the other, and there was a need to reconcile that situation. In Spain and Portugal, there'd been wars between Christian powers and Islamic powers going on in the 1060s, clashes all over the place. You can date clashes between Islamic powers and Christian powers in Spain as far back as the 8th century if you wanted to. In Sicily, there'd been, the Normans had arrived in Sicily and conquered Sicily from the Arabs. The Islamic take on the beginning of the Crusades is actually that if you look around the Mediterranean in the 1060s, 1070s, you see all over the place clashes between Christian and Muslim powers, and what happens in the 1090s is that these are drawn together and given a sort of unifying framework by Urban II. So there are all of these different strands coming together, but something definitely happens in the 1090s. There's another major appeal from Byzantium to the West. Urban II becomes Pope and really arrives as Pope with a very strong urge to do something about both Schism for East Western Church and political tensions within Western Christendom. And you have, he latches onto the idea of getting people to go and fight in the name of Christ as a solution for all of these problems. You can address all of these problems in one go if you call for a mass military expedition under the banner of the Pope. I mean, are there mercenary reasons why people are going? Is there a sense that you're going to benefit, not just in the afterlife, but in the present life as well? Yeah, I think a lot of people went crusading with a whole sort of ragtag mixed bag of motivations they carried with them. Remission of sins might be very important and was very important to a lot of people. It was a very appealing idea that you could sort of wipe the slate clean and start again if you went on this journey. I think there's a, in the late 11th century, there is a sort of acquisitive military class of knights whose whole stock in trade is going and fighting and that's how you earned your living. You thought you got paid because you collected booty and this seemed like a promising place to go. A lot of the crusaders, or the leaders of the crusade, found eventually when the crusader states in the east were set up that here was sort of virgin territory that could be carved into western-style feudal little blocks. You know, so you had kings and counts and princes and all the aristocratic ranks that were familiar from western Europe and the land that came with it. Throughout the history of crusading, you do see a lot of people who go crusading because there's money. My favourite of those, I think, after the first crusades, beginning of the 12th century, the first major western king to visit the crusader states, to visit the east, is a guy called Sigurd I, King of Norway. Sigurd I, King of Norway, was a Christian but he was also essentially a sort of late period viking and his stock in trade of the vikings, as you know very well, is go forth and plunder. Sigurd I of Norway became king at the age of 13. His brother was co-king, decided that Norway wasn't big enough for the two of them. He set off with, so the bards tell us, 60 ships, 10,000 men. He went on this incredible plundering mission around, well, he went to England, then France, and then stopped off all the way down the coast of what's now Spain and Portugal, plundering as he went, attacking Muslim townsfolk, pirates, you name it. He'd attack them, take their ships, take their gold, take their women, move on through the Straits of Gibraltar, did the same in the Balearic Islands, Menorca, Formentera, stopped off in Sicily, partied a bit with the king of Sicily, young Roger II of Sicily. By the time he wound up in the Holy Land, helped with the siege of Sidon, travelled to Jerusalem, was given a little fragment of Christ's cross. By the time he left the Holy Land, heading for Constantinople, they had so much booty that they were attaching it to the masts and the sails of the ships and they were glinting in the sun as they went. So I think, you know, you look at a character like Sigurd of Norway, or later in the period, the merchants from Venice and Pisa and Genoa who went crusading because they could set themselves up in newly conquered crusader cities and have extremely lucrative trading privileges there. You look at people like that and say, probably the primary motivation for going crusading was gold as well. But I don't think you can say it was the only motivation because of course we're dealing with a much more religious society than we live in today in the West and it's always very hard to untangle people's motivations. The analogy I use usually is, you've ever been to a pub and sat next to the kind of the boar who tells you that the Iraq war was all about the oil and you think about that and say, well I'm sure there was a little bit, maybe even a lot bit of the motivation of the second Gulf War had to do with oil but you can't disentangle that from George W Bush's deeply held Christian faith. You know, people like Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that if you put biblical slogans on papers that went on W's desk, he was more likely to read them. His Christianity played a role, his genuine sort of attachment to neoliberal democratic ideas, it's not just about the oil. And in the same way in the Crusades, it's never just about the gold. It sounds to me like you're saying that there is something big going on here. I mean obviously 12th century societies, 11th century societies didn't need much cause to go to war against each other but there is a bigger idea here happening. Yeah I think that's fair and I think that if you take away the brand of the Crusade, as we've quite often attached it as historians but as also existed at the time, you could see that there have been clashes, for example Spain and Portugal is a great example, there have been clashes between Muslim and Christian powers in Spain and Portugal for not just decades but for centuries before the Crusading period. When Gibbon wrote about this, he traced the history all the way back to the 8th century. So when we look at the Crusading period, we're often applying this idea to wars that would probably have been going on anyway. Of course there have been clashes between Christian powers and Muslim powers in Spain, modern Spain and Portugal, that's just the way that geography had dictated it. However of course once the idea of Crusading is out there in the wild, you have a feedback loop between motivation and political fact and wars that would have been going on anyway are probably exacerbated by the fact of the Crusade or legitimised or justified. Do you see what I mean? So the two things enter into a relationship. How many Crusades were there? Well the numbering of the Crusades is a bit of a sticky issue. People usually give up after five and so often people say there were eight or nine numbered Crusades which went to mostly aimed towards Jerusalem even if they didn't get there. I mean we're in pretty good agreement up to the fifth and then they start to get other titles like the Baron's Crusade or the Crusade of Louis IX and even I sometimes lose track. Was that the 7th or the 8th? The point is there were tons and tons of them but those were just the Crusades to the east. Right Dan Jones, you're the expert. Let's go through the Crusades starting number one. What happened? Part of the history of the first Crusade, 1095 Urban II stands up and says let's go fight. We're going to go to Constantinople and we're going to help the Byzantine Empire which is under attack from Turkish warlords heading to Asia Minor and then we're going to go on and we're going to take Jerusalem. And this sounds like a crazy scheme. In many ways it is a crazy scheme but somehow or other it works. There are various waves of people set off from Western Europe. The first known as the People's Crusade led by a man called Peter the Hermit. A shabby demagogue who has the rare ability to rouse the basest instincts in people and give it the veneer or the patina of respectability. A sort of sackcloth wearing Dominic Cummings if you like who just bounces along and rowdy and intemperate people find him very charming and follow him. The People's Crusade sets off through the Rhineland. The terrible pogroms and massacres of Jewish people in cities like Mainz and Worms. These sort of rabble, very unsuited to fighting most of them, head off down the Danube, go through the Balkans, wind up in Constantinople heavily depleted because along the way they've usually annoyed everybody who's terribly they've gone through and been sort of periodically massacred themselves. And they wind up in Constantinople in pretty bad shape. Behind them comes a much more organised wave of Crusaders sometimes called the Prince's Crusade. This is led by aristocratic people, quite a lot of Normans of Southern Italy involved, men like Beaumont of Toronto, Southern French lords like Raymond of Toulouse, there's a papal legate, Adamar of Lepuy. It's a bit more organised. This is the sort of crusade that Urban II had in mind, people who were competent and capable and able to fight. They set off along broadly the same route down the Danube, through the Balkans, Constantinople. And then all the Crusaders, sort of a mass in Constantinople, cross the Bosporus and, aided with some anti-military advisors, head out into Turkish-held Asia Minor. And I suspect that the Emperor, Alexios Komnenos, didn't think he'd see them again. However, miraculously as it appeared to them, they survived. Two great military engagements, one at Nicaea, one at Dorylaeum, 1097. They made it through Asia Minor, came down out of the mountains into northern Syria, besieged the great city of Antioch, managed to take Antioch. Incredible military feat. Were then themselves besieged in Antioch and fought off their besiegers. Marched down the coast, July 1099, besieged Jerusalem itself and took Jerusalem. And that was the miraculous end goal of the first Crusade achieved. Incredible, absolutely incredible. Urban II never heard about it because he died before news of Jerusalem could reach him. However, this crazy mission that he'd breached in 1095, four years later, nearly four years later, had somehow come to fruition. In some ways, it would have been better for everybody if it had failed in Asia Minor. Because now, having taken Jerusalem, Jerusalem had to be defended. Jerusalem, the place of Christ's ministry, of his death, of his resurrection, and the centre of the world if you look at medieval maps of the time, could not be lost once it had been taken. So around Jerusalem and other cities in the region that had been conquered, were set up a series of Crusader states. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the North. And from this point on, the story of the Crusades is really one of desperate attempts to resupply, to fortify, to embed new waves of settlers and to revenge on those periods, on those occasions when important parts of these Crusader states were conquered. I should quickly ask, did this come at a bad time for the Islamic world? I mean, was there any luck involved? Was there a crisis that meant that the forces of the Caliphate were less likely to be able to fight back? When you read the Islamic sources trying to make sense of the First Crusade, it's very striking. Two things are very striking. The first is that they tend to view it in a much broader context than the Christian sources, who see this as a one-off, God-sent miracle. Ibn al-Atir, the great Iraqi chronicler of the Mediterranean period, says this was all part of a very strange phenomenon where the Christian powers were on the march against Muslim powers across the Mediterranean. But he specifically, and other chroniclers specifically, attribute the success of the First Crusade to the fractured, disunified nature of the Islamic world in the Middle East. You had the Great Seljuk Empire, a sort of Turkic, Sunni empire, ruled from capitals including Merv and Baghdad, was splintering and weakening, and authority was falling apart, and various different rival Atabaks and Emirs ruling rival cities, Mosul and Damascus, and Aleppo were at war with each other. To the south, you had the Fatimid Caliphate, based in Cairo, and Shiite, implacably opposed to the Sunni Turks. Further north, these two were enemies as well. And so the explanation, given a lot of Islamic sources, is because the Muslim world was in a state of disunity, the Franks, as they called them in French, marched in and took advantage of that situation. So that's absolutely the way it's understood. Second Crusade. We mentioned the County of Edessa. The County of Edessa had been set up, in fact, it was the first of the Crusader states to be set up during the First Crusade. But in 1144, the capital city, Edessa, and much territory around it was taken by Zengi, a fierce and extremely violent and drunken warlord. News of this got back to the west, where crusading enthusiasm had really been dipping in the centuries following the First Crusade, but shock horror when Edessa fell. A crusade was organised on the principle, largely, that the loss of Edessa demonstrated how sort of weak and lily-livered the new generation of rulers in the west had become, in comparison to their brave and bold forefathers. The crusade was principally led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany. Both of them led armies which went deliberately in the footsteps of their forefathers. They tried to go overland when a sea route might have been a better idea. They tried to go overland when a sea route might have been a better idea. To Constantinople, across the Bosphorus, through Asia Minor, Antioch, down to Jerusalem. Same route as the First Crusade. Terrible, terrible idea. Absolutely terrible idea, because among many other reasons, Louis VII and Conrad III were not a patch on the leaders of the First Crusade. Louis VII, in particular, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, described him as more a monk than a king. I mean, he was useless as a military leader in that context. The Turks of Asia Minor had their stuff together. They were much more organised than they had been in the 1090s, and so the armies of the Second Crusade were butchered and very lucky to make it to the Holy Land at all. By the time they got there, Edessa was long gone. Zengi was dead, and they were scratching their heads as to what on earth they were going to do. So a sort of ham-fisted plot or plan of action was cooked up by which they were just going to go and attack Damascus. Why Damascus? Well, strategically quite important city, very important city, very wealthy, but not the sort of place you go and besiege just with a plan worked out on the back of a backpack. The siege of Damascus was an absolute fiasco. It was over within a week, and the Crusade broke up in some acrimony. Louis VII of France stayed in the Holy Land for a bit, touring the shrines, but he'd fallen out massively with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was subsequently accused of having an affair with her uncle, Prince of Antioch. By the time they got back to the West, they were ready to be divorced, and English and French history took a different course because of that. Not a crusade to be proud of. In fact, there were two interesting achievements in the Second Crusade. The first was that English and Flemish crusaders who did take a sea route rather than the overland route, on their way round what's now Portugal, conquered the significant and very wealthy Islamic city of Lisbon. And that was a major gain for the Second Crusade in 1147. In some ways, even more important was the fact that there were some German nobles in Saxony in 1147 who decided they didn't really fancy the trip to Jerusalem, and they petitioned the Pope successfully to be allowed to attack non-Christians closer to home, pagan people in the Baltic states. And the Wendish Crusade, as it's known, a minor crusade, which took place in 1147, 1148, started a pattern of crusading against Baltic pagans, eventually Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, up to Finland, which would continue for hundreds of years and become a major, major crusading arena, particularly in the later Middle Ages. So that probably was the most important lasting outcome of the Second Crusade, not the fiasco in Poland. Number three, Third Crusade. Everyone knows about the Third Crusade. This is Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. If you close your eyes and think of a crusade, if you ever do such a thing, it's probably the third crusade you're thinking about. 1187, the city of Jerusalem was taken by Saladin, the great Kurdish general who had risen to become sultan of Egypt and Syria, united the Islamic world under Sunni rule, crushed the Fatimid caliphate, deposed the last caliph, and was now taking aim under the banner of jihad against the Christians of the Crusader States. Destroyed a Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin on the 4th of July 1187. Subsequently, marched on Jerusalem and took it. Jerusalem fell, the relic of the true cross was captured, the king of Jerusalem was captured. Seismic shock went through the Christian world, particularly in the West. And kings, including Philip Augustus of France, Philip II of France, and Richard I, the new king of England, Richard the Lionheart, answered the call to crusade, turned their kingdoms over to preparing for war, sails to the homeland, successfully besieged the city of Acre or Acre, which would become the new capital of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Went on a march down the coast, fighting Saladin's armies all the way. Richard twice approached Jerusalem with the intention of taking it back from Saladin and twice realised he didn't have the numbers to do it. So eventually broke a peace with Saladin, took the ships and went home. A heroic sort of legend sprang up around the Third Crusade almost from the minute it was taking place. I mean, both Richard and Saladin surrounded themselves with people whom they knew were going to write their stories and write them up in the most kind of chivalric and heroic way imaginable. It's a very familiar story and actually one of the fun things I did when I was writing Crusaders was to take a slightly different approach to it. So I discovered a character called Margaret of Beverley. Well, I came across her, I didn't discover her, and scholars knew about her, but no one's really written about her in any lengthy, sort of popular book about crusades. Margaret of Beverley gives you a great view of the Third Crusade because she's a sort of Yorkshire lass who goes on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and gets stuck in Jerusalem when Saladin's armies are outside the walls and the account of her through terrible times during the Third Crusade has her on the walls of Jerusalem with a slingshot throwing stones at Saladin's army and wearing a cooking pot or a helmet on her head and she has the most incredible adventures around the Holy Land. So when I was writing about the Third Crusade I really tried hard to give a woman's view of what the Third Crusade was all about. So that was that. Fourth Crusade? Fourth Crusade! Fourth Crusade. I mean, really an extraordinary event. We don't talk about the Fourth Crusade too much because it was extremely disreputable at every stage. Right at the end of the 12th century after the Third Crusade had just narrowly failed to take Jerusalem a new crusade was launched and it was sort of taken up relatively enthusiastically by a small group of French lords but it was very clear that there weren't going to be any kings this time going crusading. So this group of French lords scratched their heads a bit and thought how are we going to get armies ourselves to the Holy Land. So they went to Venice greatest ship building merchant republic of the Adriatic and they broke the deal with the rulers of Venice and principally the 90-year-old blind doge of Venice, Enrico d'Andorra by which Venice would build them sufficient ships to carry a vast army. The secret destination was Alexandria in northern Egypt from which they then proceed on to Jerusalem. So for a year Venice and all its labourers and its ship builders and its merchants toiled to prepare a crusading fleet. A year later when they had indeed prepared sort of a hundred odd ships, galleys and provisioned them sufficiently for a major army to go to the Holy Land the French turned up and they had barely a third of the number of people that they thought they'd been able to raise. They had nothing like the amount of money that they were in the hold for to the Venetians. And so they all looked at each other and realised that there was only one possible outcome and that was that the Venetians were now going to be in charge of the crusade. And so instead of going to Alexandria and on to Jerusalem the crusading fleet left Venice went to the Croatian coast the city of Zara where a Christian crusading population hung like crosses from the walls and said we're crusaders too. The Venetians didn't care they'd beat for the citizens of Zara they thought they should be beaten for Venice instead of Hungary and so they pillaged a major Christian city burned half of it to the ground and left out. They then went on to an even bigger Christian city the city of Constantinople and through a series of sort of torturous politics involving rival claimants to the imperial throne in Constantinople you ended up with the rather shameful sight in 1204 of the crusaders on the fourth crusade scaling the walls of Constantinople invading the city pillaging it burning acres of it to the ground. If anyone's watched the end of Game of Thrones remember the dragons over King's Landing that's what we're talking about in the fourth crusade. The Venetians very happily for them made their money back probably several times over and if you go to Venice St Mark's Basilica today you can still see the great bronze horses that they nicked from Constantinople and took back to Venice. Enrico Dandolo the blind 90 something year old doge died in Constantinople in 1205 and was the only person ever I think dispelled really the end of the Byzantine Greek empire a Latin emperor of Constantinople Baldwin of Flanders was installed and then he had a series of sort of rather tin pot Latin emperors before a weakened and fairly unstable Byzantine restoration. The upshot of the fourth crusade was the destruction of the Christian empire the destruction of two very important one extremely important Christian cities absolutely no crusading done against any Muslim enemies at all save for a few lords like Simon Dimopet the Elder and others who realised pretty early on the way the wind was blowing left the crusade and went themselves on a sort of armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land but nothing of any serious significance. A total disaster a total fiasco and in the words of one Greek chronicler at the time absolute shame. The fifth crusade early 13th century Pope Innocent III a great reforming pope a great legalist a great believer in the spiritual supremacy and the political supremacy of the Roman church decided that the fourth crusade simply wouldn't do and the fact that they'd gone and burned Constantinople really wasn't very becoming of the Latins people of the Roman church so organised although he didn't live to see it completed a great crusade that would weaken the sultans of Egypt who were controlling Jerusalem by attacking them in their own backyard so the fifth crusade took aim at the city of Damietta in the Nile Delta extraordinary accounts of the siege of Damietta which went on for months and months and months eventually Damietta was taken by the crusaders they sat in Damietta for a bit and then decided to march on Cairo march up the Nile to Cairo absolutely dreadful decision to take because they didn't know anything about the Nile didn't understand how it flooded they didn't understand how it was controlled and the sultan at the time Al-Kamil allowed the crusaders to march up the Nile and as soon as they got so far they couldn't turn back opened all the sluice gates and canals that controlled the flow of water out of the Nile flooded all the land around and then left the crusaders either to drown or beg for his assistance in leaving kicked them out of Damietta and once again just as with the fourth crusade a major expedition of the church had ended in very little other than waste, death and embarrassment that was the fifth crusade now after the fifth crusade the numbers get a little bit sticky because some time had elapsed since Jerusalem had been lost you know a couple of generations the examples of the fourth and fifth crusades were sufficient to illustrate the grievous difficulty of the ambition of retaking Jerusalem and so you really see throughout the 13th century crusading start to fragment now much of that is down to Innocent III himself who throughout his papacy at the beginning of the 13th century made it his business to really expand the institution of the crusade so instead of just saying crusading is for going and taking aim at Jerusalem and lands close by and to sanctify fighting in Spain and Portugal Innocent gave his permission for an escalation in fighting against the pagans in the Baltic Innocent declared that wars against Cathar heretics in southern France which were really being fought to increase the power of the French crown over southern French lords who were traditionally independent Innocent declared that that was a crusade there were crusades I mean I think over the course of his papacy Innocent preached seven or eight crusades not one of which actually went anywhere near Jerusalem unless you count the fifth ending up in Alexandria in Danietta By the end of Innocent's papacy therefore crusading had been extended but it had also been weakened somewhat it'd been diffused and during the 13th century that process continued apace so there was diminishing support for the crusader states of the east the defense of those was left up to military orders like the Templars the Hospitallers the Teutonic Knights Crusading was much easier to do closer to home and popes were starting to use crusade just as a weapon against enemies wherever they could be found frequently Christian enemies so the most ridiculous example of this that you see is the wars between the papacy and the homestead German emperors and particularly the great holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily who was supposed to go on the fifth crusade made lots of excuses and didn't eventually turned up in the Holy Land in 1229 and through his friendship with the Sultan Al-Kamil and his great understanding of Islamic culture thanks to his upbringing on Sicily negotiated a peace by which Jerusalem was mostly returned to Christian rule for nearly 15 years however because Frederick Hohenstaufen had fallen out with successive popes he did this while excommunicated from the church so I'd like to say that had Frederick Hohenstaufen been alive today and brought about the sort of peace he did in the Middle East they would have given him the Nobel Peace Prize but in the Middle Ages just because of his friendship with Sultans and his antipathy with popes they excommunicated him four times I notice your book goes up until the 15th century why do you extend that far forward? is it because you look behind some of the impulses for example the Portuguese they start creeping down the coast of Africa they are influenced by crusading ideology well some histories quite a lot of histories of crusading finish the story in 1291 1291, Acre, the capital city of Kingdom of Jerusalem was lost to the Mamluks slave soldier caste Turkic by origin but had risen up to take political control in Egypt and Syria they swept the crusader states effectively into the sea and the Kingdom of Jerusalem became a sort of rump state in exile on the island of Cyprus in retrospect it's clear that the crusader states were never revived in any meaningful form and that Jerusalem was long lost now people didn't have the benefit of hindsight of course at the time so I think there's certainly good reasons to continue the story of crusading past the loss of Acre in 1291 into the early 14th century when grand plans by people like Marina Sanudo of Venice were being drawn up for a big new crusade on the scale of the first, second, third crusades the wars of the Reconquista were continuing and continued all the way up until 1492 when the last Muslim ruler of Granada was handed over the keys to the Alhambra to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella there are continuing wars right into the 15th century the Teutonic Knights are still fighting pagans Henry Bolingbroke, future Henry IV of England went fighting a couple of seasons with the Teutonic Knights when he was a young man crusades were being declared willy-nilly John of Gaunt, Bolingbroke's father when he was fighting down in Castile and Portugal had his war against other Christian kings declared a crusade so I think I'm writing about crusaders and there is absolutely no question that in the 15th century there were tons of people who considered themselves crusaders indeed well into the 16th century Christians fighting against the Ottomans in Eastern Europe and towards the age of the Ottoman Empire they considered themselves crusaders 1798 you could take the story up to if you wanted Napoleon Bonaparte stopping in Malta and getting rid of the last vestiges of the hospital as a crusading military order we can take the story as far as we want I finished Crusaders, the book, in 1492 because I think this moment of the end of the Reconquista is very important it's important partly because the last rule of a significant Islamic power on mainland Europe is extinguished but also because there's the rather neat fact that in the crowd watching the Alhambra being surrendered on the 1st of January 1492 is a young man called Christopher Columbus and Columbus then sets out across the Atlantic we know the story of Columbus's encounters with the New World but Columbus comes back writing these wide-eyed letters saying you'll never guess what I've just found over there there's a whole bunch of other non-Christian people who we can convert or kill and a load of their stuff that we can plunder and so it seems to me that all of these essential energies that have gone into crusading throughout the Middle Ages were now transferred, if you like, westwards and all of that sort of militant Christian acquisitiveness and went across the Atlantic instead of towards Jerusalem Do the Crusades matter more today in the West than the memory of them or the myths about them or in the East in the Islamic world? There are profoundly different approaches to thinking about the Crusades between this Western Christian world, I think and the modern Islamic world We overuse the word crusade massively in the West today I think we have a very elevated an absurdly elevated view at times as to how important the Crusades were to the rest of the world clearly very important to the culture of medieval Europe and the politics and military events in Western Europe However, if you look at it from an Eastern perspective from an Islamic perspective there was a lot more going on during the Middle Ages than the Franks occasionally turning up and sort of biting like a sort of annoying gnat I mean the size of the Crusader states within the broader Islamic world was absolutely tiny and the arrival of sort of major Crusades very sporadic, once every couple of generations The net legacy of Crusading was relatively slight I mean if you go to Jerusalem even today you still won't see a great deal I mean you'll see there are Crusader castles in Israel and Syria of course great castles like Krakoshevalie and the ruins of Sheppet Pelerin or whatever But really the legacy is not profound in the Islamic world with maybe one exception which is to say that it's very easily weaponised and is very readily weaponised today by groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS because it has enormous propaganda value as a historical event that appears to show permanent division between the Western Christian world and the Eastern Islamic world and it appears to show a sort of historical continuum that can be mapped onto the world today That's stupid propaganda obviously The real story if you actually look at it of relations between the Islamic world and the Western Christian world during the Middle Ages is the boring stuff of people living and surviving side by side and trading with one another and generally getting on okay and exchanging knowledge and skills and people We don't like to concentrate on that because it's not stuff of rollicking great battles and dramatic events I think it's also important to say that during the Middle Ages the Islamic world was much more riven by sectarian divides between Sunni and Shia Arab and Turk just as today the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Sunni and Shia equally if not more significant than relations between Islam and the West So we can overrate the importance of the Crusades But that said, given that Crusading is such catnip to the alt-right such catnip to Islamist terrorists it really hasn't gone away and as long as there are people who consider themselves Crusaders then this story is going to be in our life Diane Jones, thank you very much I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder All this tradition of ours our schools, our trade, our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished and liquidated One child, one teacher