Hello, everyone welcome to lies: The part of Extra History where I try to put right all the mistakes we've made, sort out what lies we told you, and tell you all the stories that just didn't make the cut for the show. First I have to get this off my chest because I've been waiting to say this since I wrote the first episode; This is the successful crusade. No other crusade in the middle east will ever retake as much territory as the first crusade, So as far as crusades go, this is the best it gets. Okay, so, now on to clearing a few things up, One of the things that struck me most when doing this was how different the conception of "history" was in the middle ages. Like in the classical period, the Greeks and the Romans, you've got historians who research, compare different accounts, and try and come to the most accurate picture of the past. Sure, they may exaggerate the number of people in a battle, but it's pretty solid history. Our modern idea of history comes directly from them, and it's their tradition we follow when we think about history to this day. But somewhere between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance, That tradition was lost, and instead you have chroniclers. These guys had a very different view of history. They would write what they knew and sort of fill in the rest. And very often, they'd write what they felt should've happened; from a biblical perspective or a storytelling perspective; Rather than what really did happen. And as these were often written to aggrandize a king, or intended to fit moral instruction for the church, There was some pretty major differences between what did happen, and what "should have happened?" For example, in this story did everyone really rise up and spontaneously shout "deus vult" to kick off the crusade? In my opinion... Euh... Probably not. But it's the first thing that anybody learns about the crusade. Like seriously, any course you ever take about the crusade, this is the first thing they'll tell you. It's all because one, I think only one, so far as I remember, Chronicler who was even at the Council Claremont decided to put that fact in there and for details like that these small details the chronicles are actually the only source we have for this period So whenever you're dealing with through crusades whether it's in school, or in a book or here with us that's our primary sources Not exactly what you hope for so just just know that going in. oh! And one more thing to clear up before we move on, Epico is terrible crusade of horribleness and the people slightly less terrible crusade of only pretty badness happened at almost exactly the same time and when I first tried writing this I tried hopping back and Forth between the two But it killed the flow and made everything a lot more confusing so I opted to start with Emicho's crusade Because it left while Peter was still gathering everyone to go wander off to the east. uh... But something that on reflection might have gotten muddled a bit was the fact that Emicho spent so long persecuting Jews that Peter actually beat him too Hungary, so when the king of Hungary smashes a Emicho's crusade it's in part because he already had to deal with Peter the people's crusade. Oh Speaking of Emicho. Oh God how do I do this? there's one really funny thing have to say and one really dark thing um Let's go with the funny one first. So you know how the crusade was supposed to be helping the Byzantines well Emicho told people that Christ really wanted to March on Constantinople, and not actually the holy land, take over the city, declare him the last world emperor and start the end times and fight the antichrist so yeah so much for helping Constantinople. and as far as people who followed him some of the people who believed him when he said this? Also, worshipped a goose and believed it was inhabited by the holy spirit and that they were following it on crusade not really Emicho so that's the quality of Emicho's troops I don't really know how to transition from that until the next part, but the heavy bit a Emicho's campaign as stupid and abortive as it was is often seen as a turning anti-semitism in Europe while there had always been Anti-semitism, this is the first case of really large-scale organized violence against a Jewish community and the anti-Jewish fervor that it whipped up is often cited as a root of some of the later anti-semitic laws uh...oh and this may leave you wondering okay So what happened to Emicho after all this? Well he of course survived plus he abandoned his sacred crusading vow and went back home to live the rest of his life as if nothing happened. so there's that but Enough with Emicho. Let's talk crazy facts about everybody else ah Hugh joined the crusade because he saw an eclipse Raymond lost his eye on pilgrimage and kept the dried-out husk in his pocket supposedly for good luck ah Bohemond was totally Anna Comnena, the emperor's daughter, totally her teen crush. Which makes things a little bit awkward as she provides us with the most reliable account of the crusades of any of the contemporary resources and only occasionally strays into passages describing Bohemond like "He was so tall in stature that he overlapped the tallest by nearly one cubit narrow in Waist and Lauren's with broad shoulders in a deep chest and powerful arms and in the whole build of the body was neither too slender nor over weighted with Flesh, but perfectly proportioned and One might say built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus His skin knew all over the body was white and his face the white was tempered with red his hair was Yellowish But did not hang down to his waist like that of other barbarians for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair But had it cut short to the ears Whether his beard was Reddish or any other color I cannot say for the razor had passed over it Very closely and left this surface smoother than chalk his blue eyes Indicated both a high spirit and dignity and his nose the nostrils breathed in the air freely his chest corresponding to his nostrils and by his nostrils the breath of his chest" and Speaking of Bohemond, remember the room that overflowed with treasure? well mostly accounts I've read that's Literally how they describe it so I just imagine him turning the corner and just seeing gold pouring out to the hall oh and remember How Bohemond's nephew Tancred never took the oath to Alexius Komnenos to return territory? Well he and Bohemond timed it so that Tancred actually arrived in Constantinople at night and then he furiously rode through the city so he'd be on a ship before dawn. So no they weren't trying to have him avoid that oath at all oh next "BROath" Totally now a word moving on. I want to talk a little bit about place names. I'm using the names for places that the byzantines and crusaders would have called them because the Turkish names were actually harder to find in some cases and Probably wouldn't do us any favors on the pronunciation score So if we ever look at these things from the other side, we will probably try to do this but for right now just know these are the Byzantine and crusaders places. oh and remember how Alexius ended up in possession of Nicaea and captured the Turkish Sultan's wife and children He actually returned them safely to Kilij Arslan without even asking for ransom. so throughout all this there were some people who were civilized which actually now I think about it leads me to a couple of the Patron voters questions Luke Haynes and Sephardic wanted to know how much territory the byzantines got back during the crusades and they actually got back most of anatolia and some of the outlying lands and Sephardic also wanted to know if the crusades were good for the Byzantines in the end And that's a really complex question the short term answer is yes, the long term answer is a pretty resounding no But I'm not gonna go into that anymore here last I spoil something that will someday certainly be another episode. and I want to talk about Baldwin becoming the count of Edessa and Alan and Johnny wanted to know about this as well. so here we go I'm going to just give the short version off the top of my head, so forgive me a lies in the lies, but Remember when Baldwin just sort of wanders off and conquers another kingdom and kind of abandons the crusade It's actually because one of his close advisors a dude named Bagrat convinced Baldwin that he should head in to head to the east into armenia because by now the crusader wasn't looking very good for Baldwin and According to Bagrat at the Local Christians in Armenia would welcome him with open arms oh, and by the way Bagrat probably Bogrot right that's probably how you actually pronounce that name but if you read about this guy Bagrat is totally the name We should go with. Now Bagrats an Armenian And he probably thinks the King will hire Bagrat to hire Baldwin Sorry to kick the turks out of Armenia and then he Bagrat will either end up with some really good position or given how unpopular the current King is maybe even become king So Baldwin gets Bagrat to introduce him to the king and the kings a Christian, and he's childless And he's desperately looking for support But he's unpopular enough not have a power base in the country So Baldwin makes chummy with the king and the king adopt him as an heir a few months later. He (Baldwin) lets an assassination plot go through that he almost certainly knew about and bang Baldwin, only by selling out his adopted father, is now king of Armenia but Bagrat, Who may well have been noble birth as Bagrat was also the dynastic name of Armenian Kings before they were all kicked out, Uh he isn't happy at all. this isn't what he planned so he starts making some noise about being disconnected discontented which prompts some other members of the Armenian nobility who want to ingratiate themselves with Baldwin to accuse Bagrat of conspiring with the Turks. Baldwin always a big one for loyalty and friendship has him promptly arrested and tortured But apparently not killed, by the way that was my mistake on the show when rereading things to prepare for lies I saw that apparently he escaped into the hills after being tortured by his friend Baldwin And after this Baldwin actually does recruit the local Christians to bulk of his army takes his remaining knights Sweeps in ever-widening area and creates the county of Edessa so Baldwin wasn't actually competent He's just kind of a jerk uh-oh also in episode five When the crusader foraging party just happens to run into reinforcements for antioch The Muslim reinforcements, that's because they were slowed down because they tried to take Edessa back from Baldwin on the way. I always think it's interesting to imagine what would have happened if they weren't? Think how differently this would have all turned out if those forces arrive behind the crusaders as they were arrayed trying still beseige Antioch the first crusade is so we're busy hinges on so many tiny twists of fate uh Which of course brings us to Antioch. First off? a commet landed in the middle of the Turkish camp during this thing and It's starting to get weird how many of these battles that we end up talking about have astrological events that just happen in the middle of them oh? and second I have talked about this awesome moment where the crusaders are besieged. They are fighting on all sides, right? They're fighting desperately without rest there are forces in the citadel there are forces outside and the battles I mean not going great, and so one a time men start to desert, but they're in the city, right so they've nowhere to go so these guys who desert they just hide out in the houses on the far side of the city and Boehmond on gets word of this and Boehmond realizes they need those men they're not gonna win this fight without those extra men, but you also can't spare guys to go haul them out of these houses, so he sends a few men with the orders. Just just go like the whole district on fire and so Boehmon just starts a cataclysmic blaze in the middle of an occupied city that he's trapped in and It works the guys rush out of the houses which are now on fire, and there's nowhere to go, but the frontlines So they're all back in battle oh
And that reminds me if why the muslim forces fled was at all confusing here's a little bit better of a breakdown Their commander was a guy named Kerbhoga uh and he was the Atabeg of Mosul Atabeg is basically a Duke and All the other Muslim commanders were lesser nobles under him as was the way with few more they had to fight under his banner whenever he marched off to war right, so Now the thing is All these lesser commanders all these lesser nobles Basically got nothing if antioch was captured and Kerhboga their Atabeg would become even more powerful and be able to exert more control over them if he succeeded Whereas if he failed he'd be disgraced and they'd have more free-reign and they could get back to their own lands(sp?) Rather than wasting all these resources on this stupid battle So just as the European forces weren't one unified front Neither were the forces opposing them and so as soon as Europeans gave the Muslim forces an excuse that they could literally use to sort of flee Most of sub commanders were like looks good to me and hightailed it out of there, right? Uh, and it's one of those interesting cases where the interest of the nation are clear but the human elements that Theoretically are supposed to be supporting that nation have other conflicting goals when you see those moments in history where you have to scream out "Why didn't they just do this?" this is so often the case? We had another question from the Patreons our patron anders asks whatever happened to uh that were holed up in that citadel Well funny story that. uh...they surrendered, but they surrendered specifically to Boehmond somewhere in there during all that chaos Boehmond got someone to offer them terms, so he could wind up with the citadel himself and With citadel he'd wind up with control of the city so rather than working all together as crusaders He sort of did an end-run and got them to give him this Which is one of the reasons that he ends up getting the city himself in the end? oh And on a totally different note remember that clergyman who challenged the guy who claimed to have found lance of Longinus to a trial by fire for sacrilegious claims well that clergyman he later found the true cross so suck on that uh and Stephen Stephen was asking about about Tancred conquering Bethlehem, and I wish there was a better story here But basically he just swept it up real quick there weren't a major forces there. Tankard did some smashing grabbed at Bethlehem, and This is one of the reasons why when Godfried is made the Ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem He decided to make Tancred the prince of Galilee. oh speaking of which you know in episode six when Raymond takes one side of the wall when they're assaulting Jerusalem and Godfried/Tancred take the opposite side this probably had less to do with tactical concerns than the fact that Basically both Godfried and Tancred really didn't like Raymond at this point though Raymond Did one cool if completely heartless thing during this There was this dry moat around Jerusalem And it would have stopped and the assault is dead in its tracks and they needed to fill it to assault the walls But every time a group of soldiers tried to do so they'd come under heavy fire and soon No one was willing to try and fill in so Raymond who was just seemingly rich Offered everybody a penny to throw a stone or a clod of earth into this dry moat all of a sudden a lot of people turn brave and the moat got filled I Have so much more, but I want to make sure we address some of the things that you guys raised in the comments first off there were some questions about muslim atrocities and the truth is I try and show both Perspectives and sort of see both sides in these things but I try and represent as much as I can without bias That's why I made sure to call out the bishops who straight-up heroically defended the Jewish populations of their towns. But the more that I read the harder it was to really defend the crusades I mean this this thing was a mess and While there were some acts of violence by the muslims in the holy land before the crusades on whole for a conquest of this scale during this time period The Muslim conquests and Occupation was actually pretty benign if you want to talk about Muslim atrocities You look at their conquerors of India where they weren't dealing with people of the book? That's a whole nother story a terrible and violent one and one we may we'll cover someday But I swear I is trying to be as fair to the crusaders as I humanly could be and thing is We don't need to grasp at straws to find justifications for these men This is part of our history, and we should look at it honestly. The fact that this is part of history doesn't make us bad or the church that these men believed in bad it's something to learn from and to help us understand the present but with that said I want to get to the rest of your thoughts So I'm gonna try to rapid-fire through a lot of these up first off you're all a hundred-Percent right on calling me out and saying Germany there wouldn't be a Germany for almost 800 years Second the indulgences thing basically this is where the idea of mass indulgence is from, but indulgences are super complicated So I may have understood it wrong my understanding is basically if you commit a sin and confess your assigned penance and As I follow it the offer here is that going on crusade counts as all your penance so you Confess all your sins your assigned penance you go on crusade boom penances wiped out But many of you may understand this a lot better than me, so I totally defer to you guys in this one. Oh and This is awesome. I get to do this this is gonna be fun. Uh what I loved It's going to be a comments lies Priest..." priest didn't use bladed weapons" that came up a lot This is actually False This is a myth that became part of the popular culture because of D&D it's actually completely wrong you can look at the song of Roland and Archbishop Turin right lays about with his sword of burnished steel, so this was just fantastic to me because I've made this mistake before I ended up having to look it up because D&D taught me the same thing and when I looked up years ago. It's always struck me, so it just amused me seeing that...oh and yes in that vein totally strongly accurate that Raymond has a magic moving eyepatch ah and Is mentioned here? Beaumont was actually Clean-shaven had short hair our artists when doing the original character sketch was looking at a highly romanticized 19th century painting of him as a reference image and I didn't see it till it was too late, and it would've been too confusing to change it oh, and Whoever you are who made a youtube account for Robert of flanders. Just pop in common threads and say we cool You are a hero and in episode four Some people were questioning 7-hour shield Defense, this is actually fairly well attested to as far as the singing goes some people are asking oh would they really do that to inspire the troops it was less to inspire the troops than attempt by the priest to keep the Civilians from panicking oh and in episode 5 we mentioned that antioch was founded by Alexander. This is False It was founded by his general Seleucus. in episode six people wondered Why the Genoise weren't showing up this they were just basically bringing supplies But because an egyptian fleet came in and blocked their way back home The sailors just joined the crusade and let the crusaders take apart their ships for wood oh also, the guy who found the lance of Longinus was not local as we somehow said he was from France that's actually an editing error. I Forgot to delete a word from a sentence that I was changing so the word local stayed in there vom I think that's about it for what I can remember from the comment threads So I'm just going to lightning-fast through the last patron questions. Let's go through um cameron Asks about how the language barrier affected the crusades I'm actually I'm sure it had a big effect on the regular troops and kept them from sort of becoming One cohesive Army, but overall it had a lot less effect than you'd expect because all the nobles shared a few languages at the very least latin um Let's See Joshua asks why this is called the princes crusade when later procedure called Royal crusade and Is that part of why it's more successful? And in fact it actually might be because it's called the princes crusade as opposed to later crusades which were the Royal crusades because none Of these guys are actually kings right they were all noble people But they weren't they weren't kings which meant that many of them were out to carve their own kingdoms and to stay Instead of to fight for a bit and leave and go back home to their own kingdoms Which probably did have an effect on sort of the Tenacity of this crusade [Crysta] asks about Civilian casualties, and if there was an estimate for Civilian casualties not that I can find Unfortunately people didn't really tally up peasants um [Trevor] wants to know if there were any stories I didn't get to but I was really interested in. I actually the rest of Alexios's Komnenos's reign Alexios Komnenos is really interesting because he tries to wrench back the byzantine empire To to some state of relevance, and I love to go deeper into it because from a little bit I got to look at but he's really successful in the time He's a lot of really good ideas, but these ideas in the end are also some of the things which led to the eventual decline of of the byzantine Empire Alexander asks about who the unsung heroes the crusades are and I really thought I mean a lot of these bishops who defended the Jews Really are unsung heroes like you never hear about them I thought some of them went above and Beyond to try and protect people which I thought was awesome Tankred where is my other favorite? the more I read about him the more I liked him and maybe because it's in contrast is on the company he kept but he's This kid who shows up and sort of just brought along by his uncle and this is his journey to prove He's his own man, and as he struggles with that and as he as he needs to prove himself a great warrior He tries within the bounds of time, but certainly more than anybody else tried to be humane, so I would say Tankred as well Lastly Paul asks uh how much did the invasions of Spain and France have to do with calling the crusades? specifically calling this first crusade and actually, that's spain and france whole different thing. Urban the second actually had to convince many of the knights who were fighting over in Spain To stay in Spain. he had to actually send out a special message saying hey, we're gonna give you guys all the same indulgences Please don't stop the war over there to try and go over to Jerusalem. So there it is oh and Finally to end things where all things end Walpole you may be asking yourself. How is he going to tie Walpole to the crusades but let me tell you it's Walpole son Who profiteered off the crusades in the best possible way? he wrote the first Gothic romantic novel and You may think I'm done, okay? case closed Case closed this can't get any better than the sentence for Gothic romantic novel, but how does this tie back to crusades? well, you see He didn't claim to write the book He didn't even claim to pseudonymous rewrite the book he made up a fake person who then made up a fake story that this came from a fake attic of an ancient fake family and that there's a translation of a work dating back from You guessed it the crusades so walpole Runs in the family and there you have it Walpole in one so join us next time for the greatest Naval adventure of all time: the tale of an admiral who is seriously unsurpassed in the history of the world and is Little known outside of his native land so yeah join us next time for the tales of admiral yi
