295. Crusader Gaza: Saladin & Richard The Lionheart (Part 5)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durimple. And we continue our series on Gaza. With this episode, we're going to be talking about the Christian conquests of the Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries. And our very special guest is Jonathan Phillips, Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of the magnificent The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin. Welcome to Empire. We're so happy to have you. Thank you. Thank you very much for asking me. Now, there's something with the Crusades, and I can attest to this, where people think they know all about it because it is covered at school.

1:06I mean, I can't tell you last year, I made a shield for a then nine-year-old. Yeah, I don't know how that helped him imbibe the entire history of the region, but hot glue was involved. So I feel like I'm sort of part of this story now, Jonathan. You're rather good at that kind of thing, aren't you? You're very good at sort of making, I've seen your house full of sort of top flight shields and sort of industrial revolution factories and all sorts of stuff. We're big believers in, well, I mean, I am. People quite like doing it with them. I think they've lost interest, but I'm thrilled when they have a make and do project.

1:42I also studied crusades at school. And I remember it was the thing that first directed me to the Middle East. And in fact, I walked when I was 20 in the footsteps of the first crusade, followed the route of Robert Curtos through France, down Italy, into Greece, through Turkey, down through Syria. It was a most wonderful trip. Yeah, but I did hot glue. So what are you trying to prove here? I mean, what I really want to know is from Jonathan Phillips. What was it that first piqued your interest, Jonathan? My maternal grandfather actually was a cartographer and he was in the Middle East during the war.

2:16He used to be walking the countryside, Mount Hermon, mapping it, like Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War. Well, being around the campfire with the Bedouins and how kind they were to him, looking after him as he walked the hillsides. And that really struck a chord with me. It remained in my head as this probably very romantic view of the region. I had exactly the same, in fact, Jonathan. I remember when I arrived in Syria on my first trip to Syria, walking the region of the Crusades, I think I was there for three weeks, and I spent two nights only in a hotel. Every other night, people took me in.

2:47Just a pre-modern world, which makes me all the more guilty when you think of how badly the Syrians have been treated as they travel through the West. I also read a great children's novel called Night Crusader by Ronald Welch, very much of its time. Yes, absolutely. Yes, totally. I could recount the whole thing to you now, which I'm sure you don't want to hear. But that, again, really was vivid in bringing out or suggesting to me what the place was going to look like. Well, look, let's go from the inspiration to where we are in this storyline because in our previous episode we were talking about Islam in Gaza.

3:26So the Arab Muslims had conquered Gaza and the surrounding area in the year 638 and they'd taken over control from the Christian Byzantines who'd ruled over it. They'd built the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in nearby Jerusalem, both sites of pilgrimage for Muslims. And as Peter Cyrus was telling us in the last episode, this was not a massive revolution that some might imagine, because Palestinians remain majority Christian for at least 600 years. There wasn't that kind of wholesale transfer of population that you sometimes see when a new power imposes its control over a region. But there certainly was a military elite that was present.

4:07And we talked about the Mayads, the first great dynasty of Islam, ruling that rapidly expanding empire that goes all the way from the Indus to Spain. And then we talked about the Abbasids who replaced them, running their empire from Baghdad. And so Jonathan, bring us up to speed. What's going on in Palestine just before the eruption of the Crusades? Who's in charge? And give us dates, if you would, so we know where on the timeline we've traveled to. Yeah, the first crusade is launched in 1095. So just, you know, three decades after 1066, the normal conquest of England, which is the obvious kind of thing for people to kind of base their ideas around.

4:42But the late 1090s in the region, in the Muslim Levant, is a time of great turmoil. In the decades before, you've had strong, powerful rulers in Seljuk Turkey, the Seljuk Empires. These were Turkic steppe people who came in from Central Asia and have established a real power base across the region. You've also got the Fatimid Empire in Egypt. So these two big institutions are there. Tell us about the Fatimids, because they're Shia, aren't they? They're different from most of the rest of the Muslims in the Middle East. Yeah, you have the basic Sunni-Shia split within Islam. And within Egypt in the 9th, 10th centuries, this Shiite group, this dynasty, the Fatimids named after Fatima, the prophet's daughter, set themselves up and become a very wealthy, powerful institution through the 10th and into the 11th centuries.

5:33But just before the First Crusade turns up, there's a poet who gives this lovely line. 1093 is the year of the death of caliphs and commanders. That's very nice. It's a great line. Powerful Seljuk rulers, and they all die in the same year or two. So you've had powerful leadership, and then suddenly it all breaks down. When you've had people in power for a long time, there's often quite a lot of turmoil afterwards. And the crusaders are very fortunate. It's not deliberate, but it's just their good luck that they turn up got a time when the Muslim Near East is very divided. Jonathan, tell us a little about Pope Urban II, who launches the first group, because this is an extraordinary movement, gathering troops from all over Europe, every class of people, from the great noblemen and the kings down to ordinary peasants with their staffs, all kind of heading off.

6:23It sounds incredibly improbable. What inspired him to call it, and how did he pull it off? It is improbable. Actually, Kings are the only people who don't go, strangely. Princes? Robert Curtin. They do, yeah, princes. But not kings. Don't argue with our expert. Back up, Dour and Paul. Right, as you were, Jonathan. I'm not going to be invited back, am I? The point is that the church in Western Europe is undergoing a sort of a reformation, papal reform movement, we call it, trying to purify itself. But also the importance of Jerusalem is something that's a great part of religious life at the time.

6:57And there's a sense also Christianity pushing back against Muslims in Spain and in Sicily. There's an appeal from the Greeks, which also is part of this. It's an effort to recover Christendom's most holy place. And I think that is the drive. The Pope wants to show leadership. He really wants to establish himself as the leader of the flock. And this is coming at a time when Europe is sort of growing and stronger. The economy is beginning to get going and merchant fleets in the Italian city-states and this sort of thing. It's a good moment to plan a big military expedition. Yeah, it's just on the cusp of this kind of thing.

7:32I mean, Europe is still, you know, the great kingdoms haven't really emerged yet. It's very sort of localized in many respects. And yes, the First Crusaders is an extraordinary idea. The idea of gathering knights and nobles and taking back Jerusalem thousands of miles away. So that's what's going on on Pope Irvin's side. But what is it that he is peddling to get all these people to down tools, step out of their real lives and sign up for this battle for his God? That's a really interesting question. I mean, you know, you're asking people to go two and a half thousand miles, leave your home, your family, your loved ones, going absolutely into the unknown in most cases.

8:13It's got to be pretty powerful. What's drawing you there? It's a mixture of things. I mean, nobody ever does anything for one single reason. And he is offering them a spiritual reward. Medieval people are terrified of what the consequences of sin. You as a knight and noble, you've been sinning your whole life, greed, envy, lust, killing. And Urban II says, well, if you reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom, I will give you a remission of all your sins, a sort of get out of hell free card. If you complete this pilgrimage, which it is, of course, to the ultimate place of pilgrimage, Christ's tomb, you will deserve, you will merit a spiritual reward.

8:52And this is one of the things that draws people to this, the idea that they will escape the torments of hell. There's that sort of carrot. But I mean, is there also sort of propaganda about what is happening to pilgrims who have tried to go before? Because the kind of picture that Peter Sarris painted was, you know, that you had a transfer of power, but religions rocked along together even so. And he told us about majority Christian areas as well. And I know we're sort of focused in this series about Gaza, but let's look at Jerusalem and these places, which is the Holy Land, which is the place that is important to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

9:26What is he saying to people about any Christian who wants to go and make a pilgrimage before he feels the need to go in with an army? It's a push and a pull thing. They are also very much peddling what we would simply call propaganda. He's saying the Muslims are killing Christians, they're killing pilgrims, they're torturing them, they're tying them to posts and putting their stomachs out. There is an awful lot of propaganda. As in any war, you demonize your enemy and there's a lot of that going on. And how much truth is there in it, Jonathan? Is there these kind of horrors happening? Very little, very little truth to it.

10:00It is simply a way of motivating people to want to be aggressive towards others. It's a way of driving them towards the Holy Land and recovering Jerusalem. I'm always sort of struck by, Crusaders come from all across Western Europe. If you come from, say, Flanders or Northern Europe, you won't have met a Muslim. That's simply going to be beyond your experience. But people from the trading cities like Genoa and Pisa and things like that, they've got bases in Egypt and Jaffa. They're going to be much more familiar with Muslims and traders. So that kind of contradiction and complexity is part of the picture.

10:37And what's also sort of quite interesting is that Urban gets very graphic and sort of revels in the descriptions of disembowelments and the way in which entrails are dragged out of people. I mean, that's part of the shtick, isn't it? I mean, yes, as I said, this is propaganda. Some of it's obviously written with the benefit of hindsight. We don't have his sort of speech from the councillor Claremont, but we do have letters that he wrote in which he's encouraging people to recover Christ's city. There's also other reasons why people go on the crusade. Nobles and knights want honor and prestige.

11:09They want to be the great man who gets over the walls first. People want some economic advantage, perhaps. The idea of the landless younger sons, that's one of the great cliches of the crusades. It's all these landless younger sons looking for adventure and things like that. It doesn't really work, not least because fathers, uncles, brothers all go. It's not just landless younger sons, but also most people come home. That's the obvious turnaround. About 90 % of the crusaders, once they've got Jerusalem back, assuming they haven't died along the way, will just go, we'd like to get home to our homes and families and loved ones.

11:45So it's a tiny proportion who want to settle and stay, but they do find what we then call the crusader states. So Jonathan, just very quickly, they leave Western Europe, They trudge across the Balkans. They're ferried past Constantinople. They fight battles in Anatolia. And finally, they get to Jerusalem and they actually take it. Now, give us a picture of Jerusalem and Gaza and that world of Palestine just before the Crusaders get there. And what do they do to it? Again, Jerusalem and Gaza is interesting. It's effectively a frontier region between the Sunni Seljuk Turks, who are ruling what we might say as Syria, and the Shiite Fatimids in Egypt.

12:25And control of Jerusalem itself changes two or three times in the months before the crusade turns up. So it really is, if you're a sort of farmer in the field, you end up having three different rulers in the space of about 16 months. It's that level of turmoil and frontier society. And of course, when armies go through regions, they cause chaos. Tell us about that farmer in the field. Who are the farmers in the fields who have to face these Westerners suddenly turning up with their crosses all over their shields and all the rest of it? The rural population, I mean, there's a limit about what we know about these people.

12:59Some of them are going to be Muslims, some of them are going to be Eastern Christians. They just have to adapt to whoever is basically in control. Obviously, they live in sort of villages. There's areas that are very much Eastern Christian, and there's very much areas that are Muslim. So you find a very sort of polyglot society down there. And that, again, is one of the fascinating things about this whole region. So after the First Crusade, which starts in 1095 and gets to Jerusalem, I think 1099, you have the foundation of something called the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. And this is this expat state.

13:32Suddenly, you've got all these guys who start off in Western Europe ruling. It's Europe's first sort of medieval colony. as Jonathan said a lot of the guys go back to France and to England and to Flanders but a small minority stay on there's a whole succession of different crusades and the whole succession of different rulers of the kingdom and we're going to focus in on the period just before and leading up to the third crusade which is in one of the most famous ones when you've got these very sort of uh celebrated characters like Richard the Lionheart and Saladin who Jonathan's written his book about.

14:05So tell us about King Baldwin III, and where does he come into the story? Baldwin III, at the time of the crusader, the Frankish capture of Gaza, is a young man. He's about 19 years old, and he's co-ruler with his mother, Queen Melisande. He came to the throne as a youth, and she's his regent. But interestingly, she rather enjoys being ruler. She's very good at it, and so she maintains control. Anita's smiling beatifically at this moment. Melisande is an incredibly interesting, powerful figure who's already effectively shaken off a challenge to her authority from her late husband. And she's good at ruling.

14:45But Baldwin, as a young man, 19, wants to begin to assert himself. The Second Crusade, a major expedition from Western Europe, came over in 1148. It was a complete failure. So there's a need to try and reset and boost morale a bit So in 1149, he decides that Gaza is somewhere that he'd like to capture Which brings us to the Knights Templar Who again very much appeared in your children's book and my children's tele-program And more recently are sort of Dan Brown fodder with the sort of secrets of the Templars and all the rest of it Give us a portrait of who these guys actually are The Knights Templar are a religious group They're warrior monks They are sworn to fight Islam, but they live in an institution.

15:29They take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They are absolutely that blend of warrior and monk. They're a very popular idea. They're very wealthy, but also, in a sense, they're a standing army. Those sort of things don't exist in medieval times. These guys live in barracks. They train. They've got a lot of resource. So if you want to give somewhere that is a difficult frontier region, i.e. Gaza, give a castle to a group that's appropriate. They're the people you'd pick. And just to join dots here, if you've ever been through London, Temple Station, you might have stopped on, on the district line, is named because of the Knights Templar.

16:05Well, even the Temple Church is very much the example of that in London. That's a round building that was consecrated in 1185, was their headquarters in London, and is meant to replicate the Holy Sepulchre. So they have brought Jerusalem to London. is a real statement of what their job description is, if you see what I mean. So King Baldwin, with his youthful ambition and overbearing mother and wanting to make his mark on the world, they're still telling me what to do. And then turns around and says, you know what, these Knights Templar, they're quite handy. I could use them to stamp my mark on this land.

16:44So how does he do that? Well, once he's captured Gaza, he is then able to, three or four years later, they capture Ascalon. So in other words, the crusader control of the coastline is complete. And that allows them really to establish themselves much, much more firmly. And Gaza is really the southern border, if you want to put it like that. In every episode we've done that, it's the same thing that Gaza is the last place, the last fertile place before the wastes of the Negev and the Sinai. And it's the obvious frontiers. Everyone always, whether they're coming north to conquer Palestine or whether they're going south to try and keep an eye on Egypt or conquer it.

17:21They need to hold Gaza and Ascalon as the port beside it. Once the Franks have captured Ascalon in 1153, their control of the coast is really, really strong. And Gaza, just south of Ascalon, is very much the frontier city, castle. You've got the Templars guarding it. And also, now that you've got that security of the coastline, you can develop Gaza. And so, for example, a major church is constructed there. It's about 40 meters long. If you're building a church of that scale, you're investing in a region. The Franks, the Crusaders, look as if they are there to stay, and they really want to start bringing the place forwards.

17:59We should say that the church is still there, or was until this year. And there are these wonderful photographs of these very sort of Gothic-looking arches. I saw in this wonderful exhibition on Gaza in Paris that I saw recently, beautiful 1920s photographs of sort of French Franciscans in all their kit, standing in front of these crusader arches. Jonathan, with the Templars, as you say, guarding Gaza and more or less having taken over the coastline and being very much in charge, what is their behaviour towards non-Christians? I mean, would it have been a beneficent rule by these conquering crusaders?

18:34Or what would it have been like for the people living there? If you're living in lands that are ruled by the Frankish kings, they have a choice to make when they conquer those territories. You can either, in the initial burst of conquest, yes, there's a lot of massacres, 1099, 1100, 1101. But once you've settled those lands, you've got a choice. You could carry on trying to do that, or you can try and work with the people in your lands. You need a tax base. You need people to farm the land. And you find that, in fact, the Muslims and the Eastern Christians under the control of the Frankish rulers do seem to have a reasonably comfortable, maybe be the wrong word, but they're not being persecuted simply because in some ways the Crusaders and the Franks are yet another landlord in this region.

19:20Also, it should be said that even if you have people who want the machine to keep rolling, you might feel a sense of a grievance against these people because they've come in and they're running what was once your land. And that certainly feels like the ground, the fertile ground, in which you find the roots of Saladin. Now that again is a name that anyone who's read anything about the Crusades will know. Tell us the origin story of this man, Saladin. Saladin, as you say, is one of the most famous figures of medieval history. He's a Kurd ethnically and he largely grew up in the great city of Damascus in a climate in which the counter-Crusade, the jihad, was beginning to take shape under his great patron, a man called Nur al-Din.

20:06So he is beginning to understand the potential of the jihad linked with the military might of Damascus and Aleppo to take on the crusaders and to recover Jerusalem for Islam. So Saladin is growing up in that climate, which hasn't really been there at the time of the First Crusade. It's emerged in the course of the 12th century, a sort of a focus to drive the Franks out. But there's other things about Saladin in a sense of why he succeeds and why he's able to be so effective. and part of that is that he is an ambitious man. His dynasty called the Ayyubids, he wants to set up an empire for them, and the base in which he does it, there's a competition to take control of Egypt in the 1160s, and Saladin at the head, effectively soon afterwards at the head of an army, is able to make a base for his Ayyubid dynasty.

20:56So I see him very much as a pious holy warrior and an empire builder. My great hero, Stephen Runciman, we need to bring in here. He calls him a chivalrous yet formidable adversary who earned the respect and sometimes the admiration of his enemies for his strategic brilliance, his reputation for mercy, fairness in negotiations, his generosity towards captives, and his skillful leadership in defending Muslim lands. We've always seen him as this rather chivalrous figure who always represents the best of the Islamic adversaries of the crusaders. Is he that wonderful figure that is romanticized in novels and movies.

21:35I think there's a bit of Walter Scott in what you were sort of channeling through Ransom and there. I mean, the things that you said there are largely correct, but there's a lot more to him than that. And I would emphasize this driving ambition to build an empire. He ends up rebelling against his patron, Nur al-Din. There's about to be a civil war. Nur al-Din dies in 1174 and Saladin spends the next 13 years fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims. That's not quite in the romantic image or the hero of Islam. And he's doing it so he can consolidate his power base in Egypt and then Damascus, Aleppo and Brazil.

22:14And once he's got all those things together, he's able then to take on the Crusaders. And just to clarify, we were talking about how Egypt had been ruled by the Shia Fatimids. Has Saladin overthrown these guys? Yes. Nur al-Din and Saladin's troops from Syria had invaded and the crusaders from Jerusalem had invaded and they both are fighting to try to get hold of Egypt. Saladin's group wins. The Fatimids are effectively his prisoners. And after a couple of years, the young Fatimid caliph, aged about 21, dies of natural causes, I'm sure you understand. And that's the end of his dynasty. So Saladin there, as effectively being the leading warrior of Sunni Islam in the conflict with the Shiites, is able to pose as a hero of Sunni Islam in that respect.

23:01So having consolidated his forces, having sort of felt now he has the strength, he turns his attention to the Crusaders. Now, the year is 1170. What is the first clash with the Crusaders like and where does it take place? Yeah, he's trying to show as well as he's sort of feathering his own nest in Egypt that he wants to take on the Christians, he wants to take on the Franks. And so he gathers a very big army and pushes up in towards Gaza. There's a fight at a place called Durham or nearly a battle near Durham, which is just south of Gaza. That's Deral Bala in the modern map. And we've been hearing it on our news bulletins lately.

23:40He goes past Durham, where the King of Jerusalem has come down carrying the true cross, the great talisman of the Crusader armies, believed to be the cross upon which Christ was crucified. They're that worried by Saladin's incursion. But they don't end up fighting and Saladin gets to Gaza itself, which is defended moderately well. He breaks into the edge of the city where, curiously, the noble in charge of it won't let the local inhabitants into the citadel, which seems a bit harsh. I think he thinks it'll encourage them to fight a bit more strongly. But Saladin's got a strong force and kills a lot of the Christian defenders, takes their property and their cattle and withdraws.

24:20Gaza is hit by a heavy raid in 1170, but it's not anywhere like a conquest. And then we have the famous great battles of the Horns of Hattin, which again was something I remember learning about in my school crusades lessons. The Horns of Hattin 1187, which is this crucial turning point. Yeah, this is Saladin's huge bid. He spent all this time fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims. He's saying, you know, you've got to back me. You've got to join me. we are going to recover Jerusalem for Islam. He's pulled together Egypt, Damascus, Aleppo, Mosul, and he has to fight. And he sets a trap for the crusaders by taking the town of Tiberias and saying that you have to arrest the lady of Tiberias.

25:01And he exploits their divisions and they try and march about 32 kilometers across a blazingly hot, waterless plateau. And he has the army and the resources to defeat them. He captures the King of Jerusalem and the True Cross and absolutely decimates the Crusader army. And I remember this image of the Horns of Hatton, when it's blazing hot day, the Crusaders have no water, they're on the top of the hill, he's surrounded them, they're thirsty. He starts, is that all true? Yeah. I mean, he's got so much water, his men can pour out buckets of water in front of the Crusaders, just to show that we've got it and you haven't.