Interview with Dan Jones on Crusaders

a brief note before this episode with Dan Jones on the year 11 47 and the Crusades now down is a brilliant speaker we caught him at his home on a lucky free day instead of recording the usual hour we left with about 90 minutes of superb historical analysis and the storytelling that's obviously far too long for one of our normal episodes so we thought we'd give you the chance for a little fee to download our whole conversation it'll help to support the podcast and I promise you something quite brilliant in return if you do if you're interested just find the file on our feed if not there's a 45 minute edit here for you as ever for free so without further ado welcome to season two of travels through time the podcast made in partnership with history today the world's leading serious history magazine [Music] so this is the first episode of our second season of travels through time the podcast where we examine one year in history with an expert guest in three telling scenes welcome back we'll be bringing you new time travels every Tuesday right through til Christmas which my apologies for the jobs is just 17 weeks away but today we're starting with history on a grand scale the crusading era spanned almost four centuries and stretched across a geographic area from the Holy Land to modern-day Spain but what was the point of it all what did it mean to be a crusader in this time who would achieve competence and what were they fighting for I'm gonna put questions like this to today's guest Dan Jones is a historian journalist and broadcaster his books including the Plantagenet and the Templars have sold more than 1 million copies worldwide next up for Dan is Crusaders an exhilarating character led tour through the crusading era it's published this month it's a pleasure to be talking to you Dan welcome to travels through time thank you very much for having me all right let's begin by talking generally about the Crusades what were they and a personal question why did you get interested in them I'll answer those questions in reverse order and say that I've got interested in the Crusades but you can't really miss the Crusades if you write about medieval history and I've been doing that for sort of 15 years or so now and I defined the Crusades in a very broad sense which is to say not just looking at the papal sponsored missions from Western Europe starting with the first crusade preached by up in the second in 1095 to go to the Holy Land because as we're going to unpack I think over the course of this episode what's really interesting to me about the Crusades is that they could be different things to different people they spread they metastasized as the period went on until you know two or three hundred years after crusading began in it was quite a limited focus there was crusading going on absolutely everywhere against absolutely everyone Christian on Christian crusading and not just Latin on great but Spanish Kings fighting each other and both claiming that the war was a crusade so so that's kind of one or rather the central fascination to me of this period yeah and I think this is what comes across with your approach that you touched on then is to look at the individual characters you were part you all together make up this great big story because if you we're really to ask someone to draw their picture of what a crusader might look like you'd get something I imagine in the general sense a bit like the character in Monty Python's Hall degre Oliver you know a knight on horseback carrying the great tear-shaped Shield kind of across a bleak landscape but somewhere towards the east but of course there were lots of different characters involved in this story you go and talk about Vikings at some point there's obviously Crusades within Europe they don't just go towards the Holy Land and I think it says multiplicity of voices which attracted me about your approach so it's about the word is much overused these days diversity but I think that that is that such a hugely important part of understanding the Crusades hundreds of thousands of different people were involved in this phenomenon over centuries and all of their experiences were different and you've gone for 1147 you want to tell us what's going on in terms of this grand master narrative if we're going to look more closely at a place range at 11:47 what's happening then yeah I thought I thought long and hard about 1099s that's kind of year that Jerusalem felt the first Crusaders and in many ways the high point of of crusading achievement but 1147 is fascinating to me because it's almost 50 years since Jerusalem fell to the first Crusaders the 50th anniversary of that date is coming up and there will be in 11:49 big celebrations in Jerusalem but it's also a tipping point in the history of the Crusader States the First Crusade had set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem the county of Tripoli the Principality of Antioch and the county of Edessa these for Latin ruled Crusader States in Palestine and sort of coastal and Syria in 11:40 for the first of those have been established the county of Edessa was partially conquered and the capital city odessa itself was conquered by a madden zengi a Turkic actor bag and very powerful and quite brutal warlord effectively ruler of Aleppo Mosul who had swept into a Desa and taken it from the hands of its its Latin Christian ruler this was a major shock to not just the Crusader states in the east but to the Latin Christian world in general because the achievement the high achievement of seizing the city of Jerusalem and establishing his Crusader States in the ten 90s had seemed to be manifest proof of God's favor for the crusading mission and here we are nearly you know just approaching the 50th anniversary of that achievement and Wow it all seems to be possibly starting to come apart so shockwaves have some rippled out from the Crusader States across across the Mediterranean world and particularly Western Europe and the result of those shockwaves is that there are calls going out from the Pope to the great rulers of Western Europe to repeat the deeds of the First Crusade to go and sort this this business out in the East but Ally to that there are other movements going on in crusading which are seldom so carefully looked at by historians and and the two that I want to focus on in looking at 11:47 are the beginning of what will become the northern Crusades or the Baltic Crusades in the form of the Wendish Crusade which is you know Saxons in the kingdom of Germany starting to push north east into new non-christian lands claiming from the selves and call it a crusade while at the same time linked to the Second Crusade which is the mission to the east to go avenge loss of Edessa you have a big step forwards or backwards depending on your point of view in the reckon Keystone which is again rather understudied second theater of crusading the mission on behalf of the Dean kings of northern Spain and Portugal Iberian Peninsula to advance further and further south until they've claimed the whole Peninsula from Islamic rule now all of these three things are connected they're not equally well known but they have deep and important connections which tell us a lot about the nature of crusading in general and about the nature of crusading as it was changing in this really important point in the middle of the 12th century okay perfect so we've had in a paraphrasing sense we've had this great moment of the First Crusade which has been tremendously successful and I think just in terms of geography Edessa which is the key to this era and we're talking about well maybe the catalyst for the history that we're going to be talking about that it's it's really doesn't it just is it just a burlap oh it's not far from Aleppo that's the kind of major the closest rise is it almost like a gateway would it be a state or a kingdom or County or not a county of it would have been set up during as the first Crusaders came out of Asia Minor down through the mountains into northern Syria one faction if you like had branched off sort of east and inland towards Edessa which had an Armenian ruler and they'd been a kind of coup effectively in the city they'd taken into Latin hands and there was it yeah there was a sort of west and south when I'm just clarifying in my mind is this vital to the route to get to Jerusalem which is this time in the psychology of the Western mind the center of the world no it's not and that's what's interesting it isn't it's sort of if you're pushing East out through northern Syria towards kind of Mesopotamia it's on the way but what's interesting about Edessa is it's the the one that's going to cause you least bother if it goes in terms of if you were to take that overland route through Asia Minor down northern Syria and down the coast towards Jerusalem but it wasn't the major pilgrim rittany normally you sort of go by sea but that aside it's in that sense the least important strategically however it still had value and significance and importance not just because it had been the first of the Crusader games in that you know the broader couldn't quite Holy Land but because it was the site of sacred relics of Cynthia Stinson Thomas and it was in and of itself an important and it disrupts this this master narrative of the divinely favored Latins or Franks I'm not quite sure which is the best tent they pretty much interchange interchangeable okay that's handy so ok let's flip from that I think we've got a good context you're understanding what's going on as 1147 gets going let's go from that to your first scene we're going to look at which is in June and you've got Louis the 7th of France and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine that might be a name that rings a bell in many medieval mind should I say they're setting out from Paris what's happening so what's been happening in France for the the past few years when we get to this point in June 1147 is that Louie the seventh King of France married to Ellen of Aquitaine who in in you know students of Plantagenet history will know best as the wife of Henry the second while him a second to a second husband at this point as a younger woman she's married to Lily the seventh of France Lew the seventh has been gearing up to go on crusade now when news of the fall of Edessa had reached Europe it has it had been acted upon by Pope Eugene the third Eugene third was a Cistercian monk who'd become Pope the the first of only two Cistercians to become Pope he had issued a papal bull calling on Western rulers in general to repeat the deeds of their forefathers and go and avenge the taking of Edessa as well quantum process or as you know and it's about how many Pope's before us and had told you this is what you should be going to do Eugene had then Rhea dressed the same ball too specifically to Louie the seventh who he knew was gearing up to go on a crusade himself during the late spring between Easter and and the early summer of forty-seven Louie had been finalizing his preparations to leave on crusade and they had been an enormous amount of pageantry in France associated with this had Easter for example Louis the seventh Ujung the third and the key so the third character in this in this story Bernard of Clairvaux the Great's of Cistercian Abbot and and man of wide-ranging influence across Latin Europe had got together at the abbey of Synn Denis and had blessed a can a great new Golden Cross there they had been flashing out their plans for this crusade Bernard had been on an enormous preaching tour which kicked off at vezelay in northern burgundy we hits of tall his clothes to make crosses for all the people he'd been exhorting the people across France to join this crusade here in June was the last point of that pageantry the last point at which Louie was about to leave so on the 11th of June he went to the to a leper colony and washed the feet of lepers you know you know the absolute inversion of the the might you know the might of kingship the humblest most penitent kind of Christian thing a king could ceremonially do he goes washing the feet of lepers Eleanor of Aquitaine his queen is kind of hanging around outside it's June it's extremely hot as she was faints with having to put up with all this nonsense when Louie is done washing the feet of lepers he goes to Santa knee once again and takes the hora flam the sacred banner of French kingship and and which is always held before free you know French royal armies as they go into battle he takes the RF lamb and with that sets out on this what's going to be his momentous journey in the footsteps of the first Crusaders overland through Europe down the Danube towards Hungary through the Balkans to Constantinople from concerns to nope all across Asia Minor to Syria this is the projected route he's going to take and he's going to take with him this is a band of Templars who are going to guard his army he's gonna leave France as regent of habits to share of San Denis itself so this is the moment a great Christian King leaves his kingdom will he come back nobody knows his wife is by his side that's quite unusual we see lots of of manuscript depictions of this of this journey they're about to take together on a personal level the marriage between these two people is not in a wonderful place will that suffice survive the journey all of these questions are set up in this moment seems to me like a full of dramatic tension and when when I was reading actually through your descriptions of the early stages of Crusades almost like reminded me a little bit of the the process or the anatomy of a crusade daily stages is this process which is almost like getting an American presidential election going you've got to kind of get your celebrity back as you've got to win support you've got to find finance you've got to have some great public displays of enthusiasm all these things seem to be coming together because of course they happened most notably in the 10 90s when you had the first crusade and was at the Council of Clermont yeah yeah what happened and this is being repeated now isn't it two generations later so there's a great sense of excitement there if I could just get you to dwell on the scene for a moment so this is Paris 12 centuries from Paris what do we know about this at this time was a big city already or it is the sort of heart of a relatively small and relatively weak French royal domain French royal Kingdom in which large parts of what we now think of as France Greater France are held more or less independently Eleanor's Duchess of Aquitaine had married Lily because she's supposedly brought with her you know one of the great Lordships of the French south/southwest Normandy has been in the hands of the Dukes of Normandy and then we'll be sort of connected with the kingdom of England for a long time the same for Anjou main terrain so the point is large parts of France are not really under the control of the French King Paris is you know appropriately smaller to a relatively small French Kingdom however that's not to say it's without glory without splendor this is still where a French King the descendant of Ian not entirely lineal of Charlemagne is sitting out front in two minutes it's a moment which is full of expectation and hope isn't it looking at it is full of expectation hope you're right to mention Louie's reputation as an Ellen as suppose it words a monk and not a King Louie hadn't been born to be a king his elder brother was being trained for kingship lose being trained for the cloister ought to be to be a bishop only when his brother's horse tripped over a pig when he's out riding you throwing more sand killed was Louie sort of bumped up it was also Henry the eighth's style through the ranks of the royal family and and there's not always a sense that Louie was perfectly happy with being a king himself you're absolutely right also to say that this is a moment of high expectation how did it go do you want to move from the descriptive history into the analysis a little bit it was a disaster I mean this this bit of the Second Crusade was a disaster corner of the third German King had set out a few weeks before Louie with one hundred some miles on him in any case they arrived in staggered stages at Constantinople where the Emperor Manuel the first komninos grandson of Alexios the first Caminos had been the Byzantine Emperor who had called the first Crusaders to come and help him read his Christian Empire of the perfidious Turks well Manuel Comnenus had done no such thing he was a lot less happy to see these Crusaders turning up as it were on his doorstep however he hurried them across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor really sort of let them take their chances and the whole thing was a disaster I mean Conrad the thirds German Crusaders went ahead they were largely cut to pieces and return to Constantinople with the tails between their legs Conrad the third himself would be very badly injured Louie arrived the French and German Crusaders kind of unites they set off for another bash of getting across Asia Minor and finally they ain't too easy it's very hilly you know mountainous countryside is extremely hot in the summers it's really wet when they go in the winter so in the autumn of 1147 Louie arrives a contact snowball in January he kind of strikes out you know across Asia Minor on the 6th of January he's nearly killed as they tried to cross base called Mount Cadmus the French Crusaders are set upon by light Turkish cavalry who specialize in breaking up the discipline of more heavily armed Frankish knights with long columns of unarmed pilgrims with them which is what I sort of Crusader army would look like Louie's army breaks up a cross man Cadmus and his nearly is nearly ripped pieces Louie himself had to scramble on the sort of on a rock and hide himself from being personally captured and potentially worse they only survived because they hand over command of the troops to the Templars 50 Templars under the command of uncle Jude bear who are accompanying them against the background of all of this even before Louie had reached Constantinople he'd almost run out of money he was sending back to Suja in in France saying advance me some more cash I'm running low here by the time they some stagger towards the southern coast of Asia Minor he's broke again he's borrowing money off the Templars eventually takes ship and arrives in Antioch northern Syria the Principality of Antioch the Latin Christian state arrives there in March release of staggering having been beaten up badly on the journey humiliated really broke again still borrowing money of the Templars when they all convene and decide what they're actually going to do now though it now that they're there instead of rescuing Edessa which is by this stage long gone I mean it's been you know four years almost since the Desa fell they some scratch their heads and say well what are we going to do now we're here and someone comes up with a bright idea I know what let's attack Damascus Damascus had no stage during the Crusader period or since has ever been an easy target - now as in this later where Saladin comes from well Saladin's occurred but yeah I mean he said Damascus is one of his point I was making more broadly was it it is always seen well considered a stronghold nice story yeah exactly and it's the ones look had Damascus ever fallen into Latin Christian hands the story of the Crusades mother calm very differently right but it never did and on virtually every attempt to attack or take it by any form Crusader army whatsoever humiliation beckons this has been the case in 1129 it's the case again in eleven forty eight and they said this disastrous attempt to attack Damascus which is over almost before it's begun within five days the other the whole Crusader army that's been summoned from the West that's arrived with Kings of its head is beaten and and broken up in five days so this is an inversion really the story of the First Crusade which was characterized by luck maybe all that was interpreted very much at a time as as a divine providence or grace that was behind them this also there is also a much more competent leadership on the first crusade yes there it's it's impossible to read the story the first Crusader that go oh my god they didn't what again and again and again and again but you don't get that lucky by the time the first Crusaders arrived in a very fragmented and turbulent holy land Riven with faction within the this of Syrian seljuq Sunni world and between that world and the Fatima cheer world based in Egypt they were battle-hardened they were like they're for war they were you know they were they were ready to walk through absolutely any kind of torment discomfort pain to achieve their goal and they done it the hard way you know but then the second crusade these guys turn up thinking well so long as we follow the same kind of path surely we can do this too and the truth is no you absolutely cannot and you certainly can't do it with a leader like Louisa 7th really how do we characterize this first scene it starts off with Lou you moment of hope in Paris it's also about living in a moment of Hope in Paris with his wife you know hanging around outside waiting for him to get done with the sort of piety zhh and set off on this great journey and it ends with a succession of military humiliations with vast debts accrued by the French crown and with Louie and Eleanor by the time they get home effectively estranged because you know a side note to this is that when they get to Antioch Elinor meets uncle by this time the prince of reign Prince of Antioch and decides that he's actually a much better bet than her husband who has not showered himself at glory at this point henry ii who melena comes comes to marry as a sort of partial result of her experiences on crusaders lates in his life offered the Kingdom of Jerusalem just as his grandfather you know had been King of Jerusalem kinfolk so that the all these things are connected and I think what this episode in the beginning in 1147 does is illustrate just how bound together East and West are in this period well we've been following really one thread of narrative which started off in 1147 and tape it on through the progress of Louisa crusade but of course things are happening in parallel at the same time and our second scene we're going to examine is in July 11:47 which is a month later than our first scene which was in Paris of course now we're in Mecklenburg modern-day Germany and another crusading army entirely is marching against Islamic tribes people known collectively as the wind of I pronounce that right the wind of the Navy airspace calm winds for our purpose name so really what we what we doing now we getting off the motorway of crusading history and going on tamaño de Rodes to see one of these slightly lesser known Crusades that does happen concurrently that you were talking about before well at this stage yes it's not even an a road it's sort of coming off the motorway of crusading and turning into a sort of little country lane but it's going to be built up in turn a road as crusading history comes along the connecting force here really is Burnet of Clairvaux when the second crusade which we've just been talking about was was being preached one of the you know Bernard of Clairvaux didn't just spend his time preaching in France he also went to Germany because it was important to convince Conrad the third King of the Germans that he too should be a part of this however during the course of Bernhard's kind of preaching tour if you like he goes to Frankfurt and at Frankfurt encounters a group of Saxon Nobles who say look we're all behind this idea of crusading okay we get it go fight Christ's enemies receive remission of sins do the Lord's work this all sounds fantastic however have you not considered this purpose on our doorstep just east of here there are quite a lot of non-christians they may not be Muslims but they're certainly not Christians who we are absolutely itching to fight and wouldn't it be just as beneficial to the kingdom of of of Christ at large if we were just to sort of stay here and fight them instead now there's two ways of looking at this one is you can you know my instinct is that if it were me in that situation I might have said you must be joking get out join you know join the crusade we're going to the Kingdom of Jerusalem and and that's an end on it however this is bernard of clairvaux and bird of clairvaux takes a very broad and really quite inventive view of crusading and he is extraordinary nimble to the point of being disingenuous at times in his theological thinking previous to this Bernards first great crusading project had been to help build the rule of the Templars and help the Templars get sponsorship you're talking about him now and I just really wanted to get my pen out of you I can draw a great big black nine line under this name Bernard of Clairvaux because he's maybe a character that if you're familiar with the period you're familiar with him of course but he just has this massive influence at this time could you just one step backwards give us a little bit of an overview of him because it seems to me from the reading I've done that as a preacher he carried enormous powers of rhetoric and persuasion oh absolutely I mean yeah and look if you know this period you know better of clairvaux but he's certainly no he's not a sort of a character who you could walk down the street and say anybody heard of him however if you'd walk down the street in the 12th century everybody would have heard a Bernard of Clairvaux born around 1090 decided to you know having had a sort of being visited in a dream by the divine spirit decided he was going to go and become a monk joined up with the brand-new order that was really making big strides in the early 12th century the Cistercians a reformed extremely ascetic order of monasticism which which shunned the sort of the grandeur of the clooney Acts who had been you know that the the last big new sort of cool cat monastic order and went in for absolute spareness of living hard physical labor isolation from the world in monastic houses built deliberately on sort of poor scratchy land where nobody else in their right mind would think of living bernard himself was a great tormentor of his own body he would you know fast to the point of starvation physically extremely frail however what he lacked and kind of physical presence he made up for in this enormous written voice he was an inveterate letter writer he would pester and harangue and cajole the kings and Pope's noblemen but not just them the sort of runaway nuns and kind of aimless young men of Europe with these letters exhorting them to improve their piety how does this one go is there a different story that plays out here right so let's pick up the story we've sketched Burnet of clairvaux so in march 1147 he's in frankfurt knee and he's picked effectively by the saxon noble saying we don't want to go crusading on jerusalem we don't want to leave town but we're more than willing to go fight the pagans you know the other side of the river and Berlin of clairvaux likes the idea and decides to sell it to his protege Pope Eugene the third Pope Eugene the third was the first of two ever Cistercian popes and he had really fallen under burners spell so Bernhard had a lot of sway with Eugene the third so he was in touch directly with eating the third who on the thirteenth of April just as Eugene's about to spend Easter with Louie the seventh decides to grant another papal bull Davina dispenser Taione which says okay fine if you're a Saxon noble and you want to go fight pagans you know and push you know push east and expand the boundaries of Christendom within Europe that's totally fine and I will grant the same remission of sins for people fighting pagans and Pagan clubs people in North East Europe as I will grant to everybody who's going on this crusade of the Holy Land and that's really important maybe at a point we let's emphasize a little bit more which is why is everyone going on crusade what's the personal motivation it is because the reward the spirit reward is remission of sins are the partial or full any confessed sins that you have committed on earth will be wiped clean and your your chances of getting to heaven in a timely fashion are massively increased through this penitential pilgrimage disengagement in the holy war so what Eugene says about is bullying April 47 is absolutely yep the same remission of sins that's going to Jerusalem now apply to fighting these tribes people who known collectively as the wins okay as we move forward historically if you want to do that at this point what we're going to see in the Baltic is a major crusading arena now the purpose will remain driving Christian Archbishop's and diocese and Christian German Lordships northeast through the Baltic because this is extremely rich trading country it's extremely rich in natural resources it's fairly temperate or they're quite cold in the winter and they will become you know by the 13th century institutionalized crusading because the Teutonic Knights move in a military order modeled on the Templars set up in 1191 th vaca who moved their base to modern Poland and becomes a permanent you know engage in permanent crusade crusading has changed and it's it's available in different forms and different sort of proof strengths depending on I can't let you escape this scene without asking you what became of the ones if you know III don't imagine they're still in operation today so they felt at some point I don't think there are many whens about the difficulty as always is that the winds are a non literate pagan tribes people and there may not actually have been a bunch of people going rogue and where the winds the winds are a group of you know link probably linguistically defined a group of interlinked tribes people including the Pomeranians and lithuanian z' and the lats and the fins and the lives you name it and what actually happened and in the longer term is that all of these different tribes slavic tribes one by one kind of ground down absorbed into this broader christian world and by the time we get to what should we say the 15 sixteenth century there are christian eyes states throughout the baat ik as you know even the Grand Duchy of Lithuania converts to precise interests in something as you said about 1140 something because we are seeing this historical project gathering momentum on me we've looked to the first scene which you might characterize as the big macro history and then we're seeing things play out on a smaller level let's go to the third of your choices in which is in October of the same year so October 11 47 so we've got imagine these things happening in parallel so Louie is closing in on Constantinople the first assaults on the winds is winding down for the winter because of course there were crusading seasons I suppose and this is probably a place you would never connect well you wouldn't immediately anyway in your historical mind but we're going to get at Lisbon right on the edge of Western Europe modern-day Portugal where a crusading Army is about to score a major victory what's going on well in a sense this draws a lot we've been talking about together you know crusading arenas that aren't Jerusalem the Second Crusade in in kind of macro terms victories in unlikely places in 1147 Bernard of Clairvaux is big preaching tour you know crusading fever as as hit Western Europe there's an army about 10,000 quote-unquote Brits and Fleming's mostly but a richly variegated mix of people we know that because the ordinances for managing the army dealt with what would happen with lots of fights among the Crusaders between people from different places they set out from Dartmouth and they take this route you know they say all southern coast of France they put ashore in Galicia in northwest Spain and then they join up with a man called Afonso Henriques Fonzo Vickers the Conqueror born and guimaras in northern was now northern Portugal England played a football match there the other day he's setting up the zoo County and what will become the kingdom of Portugal which is is centered around Porto or Porto in the broader situation in the Iberian Peninsula at this point is that the reckon keister is in full swing southern Spain if you like is ruled ultimately by the armor of its a Berber sect Islamic set from Morocco previously in the century taken control of most of you know we've got a landless Muslim Spain as our English and Flemish Crusaders arrived on this kind of western coast of was now Spain and Portugal they stopped off naturally to take on water and they they are implored to get involved in Afonso Henriques mission to expand his County of Portugal which he's sort of convert in the process of converting into a kingdom of Portugal and the major target that will help him do that is the city of Lisbon you know about 180 miles south of Porto al Osuna is a Muslim city extremely well placed just like that being a Muslim city for Lisbon as long as it's well in it's well within the sort of the broad and Alice you know it's it's not a Christian city it's it's an Islamic city it's extremely well defended within the mouth of the river Tagus about things about eight miles up river so it's protected from the Atlantic it's said that this time to do more trade with North Africa than any other city now Palermo might have something to say about that but you get the picture there's gold there's olive oil there's you know citrus fruits there's it's it's a rich wealthy well-to-do City if you're an Fonzo Enriquez and your mission is to expand your kingdom of Portugal it's the vital place that you take in the south so here come 10,000 kind of Roughnecks from from England in Holland you know here are just the people to help you do it in 1142 Afonso tried his hand at Lisbon with some ships of some French pilgrims who've been heading for the Holy Land along the same route but he had failed to take it now however there's real firepower heading his way so may 1147 these 10,000 Crusaders set off 16th of June they reach Porto by the 30th of June of there abouts they are at Lisbon I mean have fun so very kiss who's marched South from Porto with an army including guess who the Templars the first of July these combined troops having disembarked her ships storm the suburbs of Lisbon and there begins a July / September you know a three and a half month siege that has all the elements of siege warfare in the Middle Ages and the outcome that I think we've all guessed up well yeah so by October so if you're being besieged what you need to hope for is either that the crusading army gets bored or diseased or hungry themselves and goes away or you're relieved which is to say another army from someone your elide with comes and and helps you by driving the army away by October of 1147 it becomes clear that there's not going to be a relief of Lisbon because the amur Ovid's there's berber north african dynasty who are nominally in control of the whole of al-andalus southern Spain have problems of their own back in Morocco a revolution is underway and another even more extreme and puritanical sect known as the almohads are about to seize power within this this broader sort of cross your broughton if that's a word world they're not going to come and help effectively so on October the 23rd 11:47 the citizens do the only thing left them which is sue for peace now under the terms of siege crafts by and large if the city is stormed ie if it falls because the procedures take it then all bets are off and it's there to be sacked if there's a negotiated peace usually you allow the citizens or what's supposed to happen as citizens are allowed to leave with their possessions and their lives now there's a little bit of a gray area with Lisbon because miners had succeeded in bringing down a portion of the walls but on the other hand there was a suit for peace peace is accepted and fortunately it's not a peaceful transition of power so you have a degree of squabbling between the different factions of Crusaders portuguese flemish and english you all claimed different portion of the right of plunder but what happens soon enough is that there is a sack as some murderous sack you know maybe it's a you know we want to call ms okay we're quibbling terms a lot of people die the maserati bishop of lisbon has his throat slit so their attacks not just on the muslims but Christians have it other different you know the different right it's a pretty bloody scene and what you end with by the end of october is that lisbon is now in christian hands some of the Crusaders go off follow that the southern code through the Straits of Gibraltar and over winter in Italy others decide to stay in theirs before the winter because you know the sea lanes are now closing up either way what happens is Lisbon has been taken and as it will prove in retrospect this was really the major victory of the whole second crusade this crusade that set out to liberate to death so which had fallen in 1144 was diverted to Damascus grew a little offshoot in the Baltic really it's a weirdly as it seems to us now it's major achievement was the Lizbeth well we've gone from Paris to Germany shall we call it and we've ended a Lisbon and funnily enough we never actually got to Jerusalem which was the destination people always wanted to get to that's the story here in 47 I was exactly never quite getting there but ending up somewhere else thank you that's been a wonderful tour through the year I've got a bit of a supplementary business for you I can't remember if I reminded you about this before so let me throw this up you like a boomerang and see if it comes back if you could bring one tangible object to back from the year 11:47 to have with you you can maybe have it in this nice have sin-stained somewhere if you can make some room what would you like a tangible object from the time well I've been thinking about this and you know that I had some rather some grandiose thoughts about to maybe taking your f lamb but I would upset a lot of you I think what would any good Crusader want and I'll tell you what they would want would be a sliver of the true cross now in Jerusalem where unfortunately didn't visit although we set out in that direction at the beginning was you know the greatest relic in the Christian world it was a large portion of Christ's cross and this was lost to Saladin Battle of Hattin and never recovered but if you were a particularly dignified or worthy or just lucky Crusader and you made it Jerusalem and you paneled up with whoever the king of Jerusalem was at this point if you were really nice to him then he might get down to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and shave you off the tiniest little pencil shaving of Christ's cross itself which he could then take home and sort of Commission like a grand reliquary out of precious metals and and God knows what in whatever shape took your fantasy probably that of a cross which to display this treasure and you would then have brought home the greatest knick-knack the greatest trinket that you possibly could have and wherever you displayed it would forever be a part of Jerusalem and so I thought greedy as that is but you did offer I'll take just the merest little shaving if the true cross please because I'm gonna make it to Jerusalem I love that idea I loved the idea of somewhere in Staines having a shard of the true cross I wonder if you'd be a bit more product at your writing desk if it was just there above you thank you very much Dan that's been a terrific tour through the time a few words left at the book has it taken you years and years and years or did it come together in a world of excitement I think like a lot of books it's you have them why always have several books kind of bubbling around in my mind at once something thinking about it for the pretty more than a decade and working on parts of it intensely for the last four years and the writing was quick the thinking was slow I think that's always got to be the way it is well thank you very much for sharing this with us I've been reading a book get engrossed with it over the weekend and that charges along like so many of your other books doesn't I'm sure it will be as I said right at the beginning an exhilarating tour for any reader who's interested in that time thank you very much Dan Jones nothing's happening hello I'm Artemis and I work on the travels through time podcast we hope you enjoyed that conversation I was particularly interested by Dan's explanation of why people went on Crusades and also the revelation that the Crusades encompass conflicts against not just Muslims but pagans and other Christians as well you can check out our new website at TTT podcast com where you can find links to episodes from season 1 and season 2 of travels through time don't forget to visit our pages on history today com where you can find articles from their archive written by experts for the world's leading serious history magazine for example for more information on what Dan and Peter were discussing in today's episode you can read the Crusades a complete history by Jonathan Phillips or why didn't the crusade succeed by Harry Mundt also available to read is an obituary of England's only Pope who allegedly died in 11:59 from choking on a fly in his wine that's the death of aid in the forth by Richard Cavendish that's it for this episode we'll be back next Tuesday the 10th of September for a trip to 1934 and the fractious London streets with the best-selling author Thomas Harding til next time goodbye

Channel: Travels Through Time

Views: 798

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Dan Jones, crusades, second crusade, medieval history, history podcast, wends

Id: rK6Cr3RPTMc

Length: 44min 53sec (2693 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019