Ep 297 - Welcome to the Crusades 2.1 Jerusalem

0:01 Hey everyone, it's Luke, and I am here to give you some good news. Eleanor and I have once again combined with the fellows from American Prestige, Danny Bessner and Derek Davidson, and we are happy to bring you Season 2 of Welcome to the Crusades, and of course this time it is on the Second Crusade. Now, if you know much about this, you will probably know that the Second Crusade is less well-known than the other of the first four Crusades. And it ends in disaster and embarrassment for the Christians. But it is incredibly... important because it builds the framework that the Catholic Church would use going forward for Crusades all the way until, I mean, all the way until they stopped doing Crusades, I guess, when

1:04 it was back in the 1500s or so. Regardless, we have the first two episodes here for you today. They're coming out free on the main feed. The first one is episode one, Jerusalem. The second one is episode two on Mosul. And these episodes basically look back on how the Christian and Muslim powers have responded in the wake of the First Crusade, respectively. So we talk about how the Crusader states have fared, how the Byzantines have fared, the Western European Catholic Church. And then in episode two, we talk about how the Muslims have fared, how Muslim centralization goes after the First Crusade, and the state of the city of Damascus, which is the ultimate destination of the Second Crusade. Yeah, so we're really excited about this.

2:06 We had a lot of fun doing it. We put a lot of good work into it. And we really hope you like it. These first two episodes are available for free. If you subscribe, though, you get access to the other eight episodes for this season. That's ten episodes in all. And you can also go back and you can check out the first season, which had ten episodes plus several bonuses. We're going to have bonuses for this one as well. Check it out. You won't regret it if you go to welcometothecrusades.com. You can get each season for $ 15 each or you can get them both together for $ 25. And we will have a bonus discount for our patrons. And we'll send info about that out shortly.

2:56 It's as long as you purchase it before November 3rd, 2026. After that, you'll just be paying the regular price. But yeah, we had a lot of fun. uh, this one is incredibly interesting, uh, despite, uh, not being that well known, and really the more important third and fourth crusades can't happen the way that they do, uh, without this one going, um, just going so crazy, and, uh, and losing the plot, but yeah, um, We know you'll love it. Check it out.

3:32 Check out these first two episodes. Check out the rest of the season. And the bonuses will record. You know, we really appreciate it. And no, this is not in lieu of our regular episode. We will have our regularly scheduled episode that we talked about, the Army of Darkness review, will be out tomorrow. So that's Wednesday, November 28th. uh, 2026, that'll be out tomorrow for you to enjoy. So yeah. Um, thank y'all very much for listening. Check out, welcome to the crusades.com. Uh, enjoy the shows and, uh, yeah. Enjoy army of darkness tomorrow.

4:24 Bum-ba-ba-ba!

4:26 Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Crusades. It is season two. We are talking about the Second Crusade, and the band is back together. For those who don't remember, that is, of course, Eleanor Yonaga and Luke Waters from the We're Not So Different podcast, and Derek Davison and myself, Danny Bessner, from American Prestige. Gotta be honest, everyone, it was a rough year. We broke up, got back together, broke up, get back together seven or eight times, But contracts have been negotiated, deals have been made, managers have been pleased, and we are really happy to be back to tell you all about the Second Crusade.

5:04 Before we dive in, hello again, everyone. It's great to be back.

5:08 Hi, I'd like to dibs being the Ringo of the band.

5:13 Who just leaves and like, oh shit, if Ringo's leaves, we gotta.

5:16 Get something going wrong here.

5:20 Which one of them cares the least about being in the Beatles?

5:24 Um, that's such a good question.

5:25 I think by the end, George, George wanted out of that shit, man. Like he was like, get the fuck out of here.

5:32 And I think Paul was leading the band. Like Paul was what you would call the Danny of.

5:36 The, which is why everybody else.

5:41 Uh, yeah, but it is, it is great to be back. That always reminds me of the peep show. I'm sure we've got a lot of peep show fans when jazz and super Hans are thinking about disbanding their band.

5:50 And he was like, If this is the Beatles breaking up, I need to know.

5:53 So good.

5:55 Such a good.

5:57 Show.

5:58 So, Second Crusade fam, maybe... Yeah, I just want to say, I'm happy to be back.

6:03 I'm not super happy to be talking about the Second Crusade. It's inevitable, but.

6:07 How many are there?

6:08 Nine?

6:08 I was thinking of.

6:10 yeah nine numbered crusades we won't do them we're not going to do nine individuals here because some of them are really not worth.

6:17 It are we calling the crusades plural against the Hussites one is that what we're doing.

6:24 Well I mean we could take all kind of side trips too I was just thinking of the trips to the Levant but not even really because the 8th crusade never got there so what do I know.

6:36 That's why that was fun.

6:39 Yeah. The fourth didn't get there either, so.

6:42 Fourth is Luke's favorite, I think.

6:44 I think we're building to the fourth. That's like the climactic season.

6:49 If you think I'm preachy now, just wait until they take Constantinople and I turn into the worst... version of just an online religion hater you've ever met in your life, because I certainly will. And you're all going to be there with me.

7:06 Let's get Sam Harris on the pod. He has some thoughts about Islam.

7:09 From what I- Absolutely not. Do not equate me with people like that. Fuck them.

7:14 Luke is a weeb for Constantinople.

7:16 Not a weeb for Constantinople. That is not true. He's a weeb for the walls. That is true. Constantinople implies some, I don't know, vaguely reactionary religious overtones, like taking it back from the Turks or whatever. And I'm more like, I really think it's neat, a lot of it. And I think it's neat. It doesn't matter. We'll talk about that shit later. Anyway. Look, we gotta, we, we gotta do it. Uh, Derek said he wasn't happy about it, but here's the thing. We gotta do it because right now the, the animators, they can't handle it. Saladin is off screen powering up. He's, he's getting ready for the third crusade, but he's not there yet. And so, you know, we, we, the animators are, We got to do this side trip

8:18 to the second crusade. No, I'm just kidding. The second crusade is.

8:20 But you know, you can't get to the good crusades unless you talk about the second crusade. You don't get salad and you don't get Richard.

8:27 We're really negging ourselves here, folks.

8:29 Second crusade because Eleanor of Aquitaine is there.

8:34 Okay, so this is the saving grace, I think. Yeah, like, my girl's there.

8:40 She's the only one talking sense, you know?

8:44 It's just, like, it's going to be a good season. It's going to be a good discussion. Hopefully people will learn a lot. But in contrast with the victorious ending of the first season and the fun, comedic ending, things that we can do with Richard and Saladin and the fall of Constantinople in the next two seasons. It's just a downer of a crusade. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to prejudice people about it, but.

9:13 It feels like... I disagree. I have a blast with this. We got a real villain now.

9:22 We do have a villain.

9:24 We have a villain, and his name is Bernard of Clairvaux.

9:28 I hate it. Enemy of the pod, Bernard of Clairvaux.

9:32 The Crusaders have a villain, too, which is fun, which they didn't really have in the first season.

9:37 Yeah.

9:38 So, yes.

9:39 So I think, you know, I'm a historian and I'm not a specialist in this. I like contextualizing things. So why don't we take, you know, a little bit of a step back and to the medievalists in the crew, which is everyone except me, why don't we talk about what is going on in Europe, what is going on in what will later be known as the Middle East, who are the mazes? political units, what is the major development and whatever you think is necessary before we dive in.

10:06 It might make sense to really set the stage here.

10:10 Yeah, I think Luke has already led us on to a bit of a spoiler because one of the big things that I think is responsible for the Second Crusade is the rise of one of the worst to ever do it now, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. And Saint Bernard of Clairvaux is this really interesting fish. So he starts kind of this assertion order. He starts this particular reform movement within varying monasteries because he decides that people are insufficiently pious and like, look, that's normal. And like when the Franciscans do it, I think it's cute. But his thing is that he wants to do it more fancier and with greater church oversight. And he is just a general prick. And somehow he's kind of convinced the papacy.

11:00 To let him be church cop's.

11:06 And I'm constantly fighting against this idea that the medieval church is like police who are hiding under your bed, who are trying to make your life really, really difficult, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. It's a fairly disparate organization. Bernard of Clairvaux wants to be church cop. He wants to be church cop really bad, and he is responsible for doing things like, for example, getting the Albigensian Crusade off the ground. He is responsible for persecuting my very good friend and terrible man, Peter Abelard.

11:41 So because he's like, this guy is smarter than me. I'm going to call him a heretic for literally no reason. And Abelard's like, debate me about it. And he's like, no, I'm just going to burn all your books. He's mad at Eleanor of Aquitaine because like her husband sucks. I don't know what she's supposed to do about the fact that King Louis sucks.

12:03 She did the only thing she could do at the end.

12:06 Yeah, she confused him by pretty crying. Every man's weakness.

12:12 Yeah, and basically she's already had to square up with Bernard because Louis is in a fight because we are right in the middle of the investiture contest wherein rulers want to appoint their own bishops. The church says, no, you can't do that anymore. And Louis is trying to appoint a bishop. The church says, no, it comes down to an actual siege. A bunch of people die. No one's very happy. And Bernard meets with Eleanor about this to be like, you should do something about your husband.

12:44 And Eleanor confuses and bamboozles him by crying and being like.

12:48 I'm just so sad I'm not a mommy.

12:49 Yeah.

12:52 He can't get it up appropriately, and Bernard is like, oh no, my one weakness, talking about sex with a woman. Yeah, I mean, it destroyed him. It really did. I'm out.

13:09 Incredible stuff.

13:12 It's like in the middle of all this, this is Bernard's thing, and part of what he wants to do is, you know, meanwhile, meanwhile, in the Outremer, Turns out things have been going bad because white people are not from there. And so they're like, hey, guys, I've got an idea. We should do crusades to this time.

13:33 It's personal.

13:35 And he's like, we should just point everything over there. And because he's in the middle of what he considers to be a reform movement, which pretty much no one else considers this to be, they're just like, that guy is kind of wilding out.

13:49 It's kind of part and parcel with until later.

13:51 Yeah. Now, now it's considered a reform, like a part of a broader reform movement. And he's the leader of like the entire crusades ideological project. Uh, but most of that, a lot of that is historiographical that, that, you know, as work that's been done in the past hundred, 150 years or so. But yeah, but at the time, like he was very influential, but people were like, all right, man, i guess okay cool yeah like it wasn't it wasn't yet uh the hegemonic idea within the church that it would become in short order.

14:28 Great man theory isn't real but absolute giant prick.

14:33 Asshole is theory yeah.

14:35 That is real that is real you'd be surprised what they can get the ball rolling on.

14:41 One of one of the most important people in in in history, especially in the history of the European and the European colonial world. But he's just. Yeah. And so you've got that going on within the various polities around. It is now the middle of the 12th century. So, you know, just in case you don't know, folks, Odessa is going to fall in 1144.

15:13 Yeah, we'll talk about Odessa in a bit.

15:17 Crusade is going to be called in 1145, and it happens basically in 1147, 1148, anyway, to situate us in the timeline. Anyway, the various polities of Europe, are going through it very, very bad. Louis, we'll talk about more specifics later. Louis, the early part of Louis' reign is just him bumbling. This is Louis VII, just to be clear. Yes, thank you.

15:49 You can always say Louis with a French kick.

15:52 You can, really.

15:53 You can.

15:53 And you're kind of fine, unless it's one of the French.

15:56 Some Louis are less... doofus-y than others i guess.

15:59 Yeah but this is a big doofus and and he's he he's got he's got a lot on his heart and and he needs a lot of of of penitence and forgiveness but um.

16:11 He's got big feelings folks he's got big feelings.

16:15 He does and he's gonna make them everyone else's problem um He, uh, so in, in, in France, you've got that. He, he, his rule is, is pretty ironclad. There's not a lot of like civil disruption at this point. Uh, but, uh, he has, uh, internal court disruption, uh, in Germany or the whole, I'm sorry, in the Holy Roman Empire, uh, There is not a Holy Roman Emperor at this time.

16:47 Conrad III is technically the King of Germany, and he got two of the three crowns, but he wasn't crowned in Rome, which was still the standard at the time. So he was for a long time called Holy Roman Emperor, essentially out of deference.

17:05 But yeah, he's the king of Germany. You can't take the title unless the Pope specifically puts it.

17:13 Yeah, the Pope has to crown you and say, this is a very special boy.

17:19 The process of electing a ruler for the German states would get you up to the point of being like king of Germany or king of the Romans, depending on what title they were using. But to be emperor, you had to get the special thumbs up for the Pope.

17:32 Yeah, but in the Holy Roman Empire, they are beefing with each other. Conrad was the anti-king of Germany before he became the king. He has to quell a rebellion from another claimant to that crown. But he does that and has stabilized it somewhat. However, he's still somewhat at odds with the papacy and also at odds with a secondary character to this, Roger II of Sicily, who we'll talk more about probably in a later episode. So you've got that. The German states, the HRE, they aren't as...

18:21 uh hostile towards constantinople at this point and actually by the end of this they're going to have a very close relationship for a little while uh spoiler conrad the third's going to marry a uh niece of manuel the first come nunos anyway uh the the emperor of the byzantines um But in France, they fucking hate Constantinople. It is a foregone conclusion. Bohemond was a super, whatever you want to call a celebrity of the time, he was that, and he had sullied that relationship already. He had run them through the mud. They were prepared for this. In Iberia, you have various kingdoms and principalities that are trying in very disjointed disconnected efforts to reclaim parts of the iberian peninsula for their own territories not for an entity called

19:24 spain because that won't exist for 300 years at least more than 300 years actually um but yeah.

19:32 They are look i think this is actually a good Oh, go ahead.

19:35 Sorry.

19:35 Yeah.

19:40 We're going to be doing something, um, a little different this season from the first season and talking about some things that happen, uh, outside the, uh, these Holy land, if you will. Um, and part of this has to do with themes that you've already touched on the, the attempt to formalize crusading Bernard's effort to, you know, kind of make this a, uh, an institution, the involvement of, of higher level, let's say, uh, uh, European, uh, personages, kings instead of lords, in a more of a church, more of a structured, at least an attempt at a structured way of doing things. Crusading becomes then much bigger than just going and taking Jerusalem. And you get, you know, the Reconquista, again, to use a term that I hate,

20:32 you know, talked about in terms of crusading, which is sort of coming back to, right, because the Reconquista kind of helped create the idea of crusading and now we bring it back around and, you know, they're talking about crusades to Iberia and there are also crusades to the north of Europe where you have still some pagans, exciting stuff.

20:51 So we're going to talk about those things as well. Briefly, we'll take a couple of side trips to talk about what happens in Iberia and what happens in northern Europe.

21:01 Yeah, so... And the reason we're going to talk about Iberia and the Windish Crusade, as it's often called, is because, first of all, they all largely stem from the same papal bull, which is issued by Pope Eugene III. It is called Quantum Predicisaurus. And we'll talk about it. He's going to issue... further bulls and letters that reference back to this and incorporate it by reference, essentially, which do provide the same dispensation, the same benefits of going to Jerusalem or the Holy Land more generally to people who go down to Iberia to try and retake parts of the Iberian Peninsula from the various Muslim polities there, and also for the North German peoples and the Danes, especially the area of Schleswig-Holstein, for them to try and invade

22:25 and conquer The Windisch Lands, which is now part of northeast Germany, but that is going to run into issues as well. However, they're all incorporated together, and this is, in fact, not a historiographical or a later invention periodization by us. By 20 years after the event, they are going to be written about as All of these army movements, 11 of them that we'll end up talking about in total, all of them are going to be talked about as a single crusade venture within 20 years of this.

23:08 So, yeah.

23:10 Who are we to argue with medieval people themselves? If they want to categorize this as part of a broader crusading movement, they can have at it.

23:19 Right.

23:20 But are we suggesting it's not, essentially?

23:22 No, I agree.

23:24 I mean, what is the way to think about it then?

23:28 I mean, I'm on the side of thinking about it as a movement. I think the artificial delineation of First Crusade, Second Crusade, Third Crusade, it's helpful if you're teaching about this or writing about it, I guess, because there are discrete expeditions. But if you start to think about it as these are entirely separate endeavors, which that categorization tends to do, It's a mistake. It's not that. This is all one movement.

23:54 Yeah, and I mean, it's one of these annoying things because I'm going to give you every historian's favorite answer, which is it's more complex than that. You know, which is so both Derek and I really don't like– well, and Luke as well. We don't love the term Reconquista.

24:08 Because– Whoa, whoa, whoa. All of a sudden I'm being labeled a Francoist here.

24:13 Yeah, I know, right?

24:14 It's– It is 100% a part of the fascist historiography for Spain and this idea that there is a concentrated movement on the part of a nebulous Christendom to take back the Iberian Peninsula. Now, it is true that the church is like, yeah.

24:30 Fill your boots. Go for it.

24:34 And they certainly write about it in this way, but also actions on the ground of the individuals involved there. you know, they're a little bit more chill about Muslims than one would think. Although, you know, arguably, the fact that you would have a fractious set of states that people are interested in keeping up to their own advantage, not necessarily a universal Christendom, hmm, where have I heard that before, right? So, you know, it does look a lot like the same sort of thing. Crusading is, I think, on the whole.

25:09 Yeah, it's kind of a political tendency. It's a religious organizing principle, and that's what we're getting at here.

25:15 I also think, just to build off of that slightly, I also think that in this instance, we can see an intentional attempt to found an ideological movement, a brand, whatever you want to call it, a lifestyle, whatever you want to call it, to found that here. bernard was doing that eugene was doing eugene the third was doing that by piggybacking off of bernard uh one of the principal chroniclers of the french army uh odo of duel uh he writes his chronicle of this as a how-to manual for future french crusaders like it is written in that style very intentionally and i think that Because they did this and because they viewed this as a wider thing, you can see why this becomes a movement, why it becomes an ethos for the church, for how it colonizes places.

26:24 And of course, as we talked about last time, this is not the same type of colonization that happens when they go to the Americas. And the colonies that they form there, however, these are still colonies of a sort, and this is a more local form of aggressive expansionist colonization, and therefore... because they felt it all this way and they continued to use the, uh, the term, you know, the crusade term for things, even long after we start, stop having numbered crusades. And, and as Eleanor mentioned, the Hussite crusades in the 1430s, you know, like they're still using it then. So, yeah, I think it's, I.

27:08 Mean, there are crusades against the Ottomans. Yeah. Like it continues to be a, yeah.

27:12 It's an organizing principle, right?

27:16 Yeah, and it becomes a distinctive feature of Western society. I mean, I think it was Dwight Eisenhower, right? Derek titled his memoir on World War II, Crusade in Europe. So it becomes this, like, key discursive framing of how the quote-unquote West, and we'll talk about this a lot more, but, like, I think this story, this series is almost going to trace the formation of the quote-unquote West.

27:38 Like, this is going to be one of the.

27:40 I agree.

27:40 It is very far, yeah.

27:41 Yeah.

27:43 I always laugh at this stuff. People who title, like Eisenhower, do you think the Crusaders won, man? What are you doing? What's the legacy of this enterprise?

27:55 I don't ever want to be on the side of these losers. Also, I love it. It's like, wow, a crusade in Europe. Can you imagine?

28:01 It's never been done before.

28:04 I was going to say, Yesterday, I was reminded that during World War I, when the French invaded Syria as part of that, one of their generals stormed into the mausoleum where Saladin was buried and tore open his tomb and said, like, And Saladin, I'm here, you know, to finish the crusade that my ancestors started or something like that.

28:36 And disinterred him.

28:38 I mean, Robert Allenby marched triumphantly into Jerusalem, which meant nothing. I mean, militarily, it didn't mean anything, but they made a huge deal out of it. Like he's returned to the holy city of Christendom.

28:51 Do you know, ironically, medieval people would be pissed about that. They'd be like, how dare you disrespect my boyfriend, Saladin?

28:58 Oh, they'd be so mad.

28:59 Yes, actually. They would hate that, but fair enough.

29:05 So maybe, I mean, there's a couple of other big themes that we can talk about and personalities who will be coming back again and again. And then I want to get into sort of the situation on the ground in the Crusader States for the last half of this episode. But in terms of themes, I think another one that we will touch on It won't be a huge focus this season, because the Byzantines are not a huge player in the Second Crusade, but they will become the, for some observers, including Odo, I believe, they will become the reason why the Second Crusade fails, which just continues the deterioration in the Crusader-Byzantine relationship, leading up to what I consider to be the quintessential crusade, the Fourth Crusade, when

29:51 they go to Constantinople instead of to the Holy Land. So there's that, there's also, I think, the, the recreation of large polities on the Muslim side, which is something that we, again, it happens kind of on the periphery of the main story, but it happens partly in response to the first crusade. And we'll see this in Anatolia with the Seljuks who, you know, now realizing what they're dealing with, with these, you know, weird, quirky, Latin Christians coming in will say, we have to work together, and they'll approach the other Turkic principalities of Anatolia and eventually absorb them. So it's to the detriment of those other principalities, right?

30:42 But part of the case they're making is we need to work together against these guys. And lo and behold, when they're not fighting each other, they're actually pretty effective at fighting crusaders. And then the big figure who sort of encapsulates this is Imad ad-Din Zengi and his son Nur ad-Din, who are the rulers of Aleppo, also Mosul at various times, and really start to create a serious political entity, kingdom, emperor. It's an Atabeg. I'll talk about that next episode. But it's... It really starts to emerge as a major power in Syria until they make their fatal mistake of sending Saladin to Egypt to try and take over Egypt for them, and he just takes over Egypt for himself. But that's down the road. But again,

31:37 this sort of emergence of serious Islamic powers to counter the Crusaders is, I think, another thing that really comes out in this season.

31:48 It's very exciting. I love it when the band gets together.

31:52 Yeah, it's charming.

31:55 It's like, you know, when the Power Rangers make the Megazord or whatever.

32:00 You nailed it.

32:04 With this current reference? You like that shit?

32:07 I do. It's great.

32:08 Yeah, very contemporary. But are there any other things that people should be kind of looking out for as we go forward in terms of big picture themes?

32:21 I think that one of the things that we are going to see here, which really differentiates this second phase of crusading from the first, is that at this point in time, we are exclusively in relating to the Crusades as a noble and royal endeavor. And you are not going to see regular people here. unless they are in the baggage train, you know, doing jobs. This is something that is exclusively aimed at the royalty and nobility. And in particular, one of the ways that they are doing this is, you know, we've brought up a Bernard of Clairvaux.

32:56 They're basically blackmailing them. They're saying, hey, I've noticed how sinful you are because they all are, right? All you have to do is look at a hell of fresco and you'll see that everyone who's in there is like a cardinal and a king. No one is ordinary people in these things. And it's because they understand that their position is rather hypocritical, all things considered. So they start kind of saying, wow, like, nice kingdom you've got here.

33:21 Be a shame if you went to hell forever. And also here's a fantastic way of getting out of it, which is by going on crusade. And this is because the church has further consolidated its power. In the intervening 50 years, you know, as we said in the First Crusade, they sort of call the First Crusade in order to prove that they are their own legal entity.

33:44 And that is what, you know, kingdoms do. They call wars.

33:47 So they wish to do this more so. And it's a really effective way of pulling the strings of varying groups. members of the nobility and royalty, especially if they are not doing what it is you would like them to do.

34:04 There's a lot of that. Yeah.

34:06 Just a quick question. I'm really interested in this process of state formation. So what are the institutions that the church has developed by this point in history that it's able to sort of enforce its.

34:19 Power.

34:20 Canon law! Woo woo! Is the major thing.

34:24 And now the canon law has been there the entire time, but we have just kind of got to what we as medievalists call the 12th century renaissance at this point in time.

34:36 So we have done a few things. Which is to say the church.

34:39 I don't know why I'm we in here. It's like I'm a woman, but okay. But for example, they've invented the university. So now they have a pretty firm control on education in the higher echelons of not only the church, but everyone more generally. So this is a way of kind of getting Tudors out into the world. And, you know, it does good things. The liberal arts are good, I would argue. Controversial take.

35:07 Yeah, we'll let it slide.

35:08 And so they also have, as part of that, a corresponding flowering. of the legal jurisdiction of the church. And indeed, that's what St. Bernard is showing us. You know, they are increasingly prosecuting religious matters within the mechanisms of the church, not just for people within the church, but people outside of the church. And that means more particularly, to be honest, powerful people, because they don't care what the cobbler is doing.

35:43 That's not what this is about. But they do care what the nobility are doing, and they use it as a means of getting more money out of them, of attempting to get their candidates proclaimed bishops. And so it just is that they are more powerful now. They're more powerful than they were during the First Crusade. The story is really out there that they are the people who are able to tell kings and queens what to do. essentially, which kings and queens are chafing under, but they're still doing it, you know?

36:18 Yeah.

36:19 This is going to sound like an unsatisfactory answer, and I apologize for that. But at some point, I don't know. I tend to think of it as being like after either like right around the First Crusade or after that or something, the church reaches a tipping point where it has– enough power to really overall a lot of the states that exist and are forming in Europe and help form them in the future to the way it goes.

36:58 And this is how the church becomes part of, if we talk about it in like Marxist jargon, it becomes part of the overlaying superstructure that enforces like, social order up and down, uh, the line for, uh, for everyone in, uh, in medieval Europe and, and early modern Europe to, to some extent too. And, um, it, they, this, this happens gradually and I don't really think that it happens, um, consciously for the most part, but at some point the popes realized that they have this amount of power, uh, and that they can influence it not just to like do things but like when you because religion is still so powerful still so pervasive at this point and because the leaders even though they will employ religion cynically they

37:57 still do believe this is true they believe in god they believe a letter a literal hell exists and they do not want to go there and um So that's why you have the Holy Roman Emperor kneeling in the snow in front of Canossa Castle. And when you have that, the message is hard. Even the dumbest pope ever could read that and say, oh yeah, that means I have some kind of power over these people to shape this.

38:30 And it's not a conscious ideological thing for a long time, but they do realize that and start to use it.

38:37 I never would have done that shit. I never would have gone to Kenosa.

38:41 No, absolutely not.

38:44 I mean, hair shirt, marching in the snow.

38:47 I'd be like, damn, that's crazy.

38:49 I'm staying here. I'm staying here against the fire. Thank you very much.

38:53 Damn, Pope, I'm sorry that happened to you. That sucks. so speaking, uh, I think, uh, of appropriately enough of state formation, let's, let's shift now and talk about the situation, uh, in, uh, ultra mayor, uh, as we get to the, the Eve of the fall of Odessa, there's a few things we should cover here. Um, some of it may, um, duplicate if people listen to the bonus episode that we did from the, on the first season, we may, we may, dip back into that a bit, but I want to talk about sort of bigger picture things in terms of the politics of the Crusader States and how they relate to one another. As they're coalescing internally, they're also trying to kind of figure out how they relate as this new unit of states occupying this territory that is brand

39:49 new to Latin Christians. And Jerusalem really emerges as the overlord here in a sense. And that in particular is interesting to me because leaving the religious aspect aside and the fact that it was the target of the First Crusade and all of those symbolic things, if you had to look at the cities that were the centers of these polities, at the end of the First Crusade and for the first half of the 12th century, Antioch, Edessa, Tripoli, and Jerusalem. There's no question that Antioch is the most important of those cities. But it is frittered away, I think, partly by Bohemond, but also, you know, there are other dynamics at play that make Jerusalem emerge as the, it's not quite a vassal relationship, but really the center of,

40:40 all these other states.

40:42 So antioch is a larger city at the time its walls are more uh it has better defenses it it's closer to the sea it you know it has uh it has its own river riverine uh supply and things like that um but jerusalem is jerusalem and you know like Baldwin, the first of Edessa, when he abdicates that to one of his cousins, Baldwin of Boulogne, he comes down to Jerusalem and he takes the crown for himself and he carves out this thing. And that is, I really, Eleanor, I really have trouble explaining, like, what a huge deal that is mentally and spiritually and culturally to, to these people, because they finally, not only do they finally have Jerusalem back, they don't just have access to it. They don't, it's

41:50 not just like a city state that's there amongst everything. It's a kingdom and there are other kingdoms around it and we can get there. We like, we have something there. And this is like, It's the most important city to most of Europe and part of the Levant. And he just takes it because he can and because the patriarchy can't stop him. And when that happens, despite Antioch having more knights at the time because of just the vagaries of what happened after the crusade and how Bohemond kept a lot of his vassals uh very close to him um despite that and and despite tancred actually running it pretty well for the time he does uh they're all looking to jerusalem because jerusalem is the big deal and

42:47 whoever hold like that that's just i think they look to it reflexively like i don't even know i don't even know like if there is a way that they could have looked to antioch like that.

43:02 I don't think so. You're bang on here, Luke.

43:04 Fundamentally, it doesn't matter that Antioch is probably the better city in terms of trade that's better defensible because Europeans don't care about any of that.

43:15 They do not care. Antioch, sure.

43:18 Notably, the Byzantines cared because they wanted Antioch back and didn't give a shit about Jerusalem. Really, just didn't care.

43:25 100%.

43:26 It's this classic East-West split where what you see from Constantinople, the view there is always an attempt to do something fairly pragmatic to hold on to their established tax base and create a buffer zone between what they see as their home in Constantinople and, you know, the marauding hordes of the heathen, right? But for Western Europeans, they're here for Jerusalem.

43:55 And that's it.

43:56 And if they have to establish other bases or cities or kingdoms in order to make getting to Jerusalem more safe, they will. And so this is also why we see so much Indonesian fighting in the varying Otrober kingdoms, right? Because they actually are like, oh, I see, I have to live here, right? And so it becomes clear where the money comes from and what is more defensible very quickly.

44:26 And it's very difficult to telegraph that back to Western Europe where people have an almost exclusively romantic and religious ideal about what is supposed to be going on there.

44:41 So what do we know about the ways that these emerging states or principalities related to the populations that they're now suddenly ruling that, you know, really you just plopped a new ruling class, uh, onto, uh, you know, this, this local population, uh, can we, is there much that's written about this? I don't know, like in the Chronicles or the, you know, the, the, uh, to the Europeans care at all, about what's happening to the local population in the region or how they're being ruled, or is this sort of glossed over?

45:18 So it depends based on the Crusader state, Edessa, because the county of Edessa basically just took the old territory that was Edessa, and they didn't impose a new religion on top of everything. They didn't really change anything administratively. Again, Baldwin was actually... welcomed in as a liberator by the people and then the people did a palace coup for him to actually take the throne from the other guy and um so their relationship to the locals was much more friendly tripoli was small it went as uh a lot of how jerusalem was um But the thing about Jerusalem and Antioch is that they are taking very large swaths of territory from other groups, so they've pissed off locals, indigenous people who've lived there for centuries, Turks, Arabs, local

46:30 various Levantine Christians, etc., etc., and they've They found a way to piss a lot of them off, even people who would nominally be on their side. And they did care about relations with the locals, but that was because that is how their livelihood had to come. So they basically, they would just strip out the leadership that was there, unless they were still friendly with it, of the people within their new territories. And they would put their people down on top of it, and they would just become the new governor instead of the adobe, the new lord instead of whatever. And in doing this, they were able to maintain a similar relationship to the manorial relationship that was there in Europe because the locals– who worked were

47:25 tied to the land basically in, in a similar way. I can't tell you if it's exactly, if it's closer to, to being a peasant or a serf, but they're still tied to the land and it's still not great for any of them, just like it is across the rest of the world. Um, so they did care and they did have these relations and, um, Over time, many of them were cordial, and the way that we know about these is basically from historians who have read old charters that still exist, and they talk about, you know, like, you'll have these lands, you'll have these fields, these people are vassals to you, you know, now for, you know, they have to swear fealty, et cetera, et cetera. And so...

48:09 The relations to locals in Jerusalem were contentious, but they tried to keep them on side. Antioch was much harder because they were fighting a three- or four-sided war instead of one to two, basically.

48:25 Fundamentally, these people understand that someone needs to be growing the crops because they're not going to do it.

48:30 Correct.

48:31 But still, they also do not necessarily see any of these individuals as equals to even indeed in the limited sort of a way that they would understand other Christians to be the same under God's sight.

48:47 So the stupid mistakes.

48:49 Are going to be made, and possibilities to earn some goodwill will be squandered.

48:57 Spoiler. I will say that the Crusaders, as we will find out during this very series, The Crusader States, for all the bluster they might have about this being a civilizational struggle and all that sort of stuff and how that propaganda is used to great effect in Europe They bow to material realities all the time. They're going to bow to material realities at the end of this crusade.

49:28 And they're going to say, we can't do this because if we keep doing this, you know, we're going to be overrun by these other polities. And so they say, make deals with them and they come back into relationships with them and, and will, and go to war with some of them again in the future with some of them as allies. And so like they, they do bow to these local realities regardless, in some cases, regardless of what the, like, uh, what the propaganda and, and especially what the chroniclers say, because I think I've talked about it before, but the chroniclers of this time hate that, The crusader states actually worked with Muslims. They kind of detested it. Not kind of. They definitely did. Oh, yeah, 100%.

50:14 And so they would downplay it. But as I said, in order to find it, you have to go to charters and things like that.

50:20 I actually have a quick question about that because in Islam, Christianity isn't necessarily looked down upon in quite the same way. What is the role of Islam in the crusader imagination or really the medieval imagination here? Is it just an other and inhuman and that's that? There's no sense of.

50:41 Abrahamic?

50:42 No.

50:43 Oh, God, no. You get a better relationship between....

50:49 The Muslims and Christians in Iberia, and indeed Jewish people there, because since they live cheek by jowl with each other, it's much more difficult to convince them that that other person is really, really bad. But much in the same way, I mean, like I live in the UK, right? You're more likely to hear someone say that the UK is being overrun by quote unquote, you know, with refugees and that, you know, white people are going to be a minority soon from people who haven't ever seen a brown person with their eyes.

51:21 Right.

51:22 You know, whereas if you live in London, you're like, what? While you're eating a shawarma.

51:26 Right.

51:27 So you if you are familiar with these people, much less so if you are not, then you simply relate to them as a sort of monster. You know, what's the difference between a dragon and and a group of people who are curled around Jerusalem right now in these people's imagination.

51:46 Got it. Eleanor, if the film Kingdom of Heaven taught us anything, it's that a hot, agnostic white boy would see the nobility in Islam... Just as he sees the flaws in Christianity.

51:59 I'm down bad for every agnostic white boy.

52:04 It's true. I mean, look, there are very few movies where David Thewlis looks directly in the camera and says, we deserved a 9-11. So, you know. There were actually a couple from around that time period, but yeah.

52:25 Um, Yeah, someone had to say it down.

52:27 I mean, he's like, they're coming back to take Jerusalem and they're going to slaughter us. And we absolutely deserved it because we treated him like this. It's like, hmm, I wonder what point this would be. Dang, dang.

52:40 What's he saying here?

52:41 Yeah.

52:42 But that's for, we should table the Kingdom of Heaven discussion for next season, I guess.

52:47 Okay, fine.

52:48 All right. I want to talk about Edessa specifically because it's Edessa that is really, I guess, is it the first state to be formed? Actually, the first of the crusades to be formed is definitely the first one to fall. 1098.

53:11 All precipitates.

53:13 Yeah. So, uh, first, first in, first out, I guess, um, it, uh, it's fall will precipitate the second crusade, the, the, the call for the second crusade and the campaign. Um, What can we say about Edessa in terms of its position within crusader politics? It's interesting that I think, you know, the Baldwin, you know, the crusade leader who creates the state of Edessa then chucks it away to become king of Jerusalem. But that's an interesting connection to the royal family in Jerusalem. It's also interesting because of the Armenian population.

53:52 Maybe we can talk about that as well. We sort of talked in general terms about relationships with locals, but the Armenian population in Edessa really stands out, and in particular, the connections between Rome and the Armenian church in this period, because I think these things fuel, to some degree, the level of, the number of alarms that go off in Europe when it falls, right? It's not just that the state has fallen, it's that there's these ties to the Armenians, their fellow Christians, all of that I think maybe fuels the degree of the response.

54:32 Oh yeah, absolutely.

54:33 Because it is one of these things where they don't know very much about what's going on over there, but they do understand that there were some Christians over there. They're less clear on the fact that there were, for example, Christians in Damascus or Christians in Jerusalem or these other places. But they do understand Edessa to have been a pretty large Christian state And I do think that it is also seen as kind of uncomfortably close once again to Constantinople as well. This was like a nice reestablishment of a buffer zone. This was a way of saying, look, we're getting a concomitant sort of Christian series of things going on here. Now, does the papacy take a dim view of the fact that they are the wrong flavor

55:19 of Christianity and that they like the fact that they do not bow and scrape before the primacy of Rome?

55:26 Of course not.

55:27 But a lot of this is very specifically tied to the Christian imagination, I think you could say, and the way that they feel about the world and think about it. So for them, this is a loss that has very much to do with their psyche.

55:46 Yeah. And I would say the position within crusader politics specifically is that Jerusalem and Antioch would consider it ancillary. Not unimportant, but they're far more worried about other things. And it's also positioned differently. It's not along the coast, so it has that relationship. It's also the closest one to Mosul, which is the largest and most powerful Muslim city in the region of northern syria what is now northern syria northern iraq um so it it has that relationship to the crusader states but to constate constate and opal loves edessa because it is a buffer and they love this buffer as they they never asked for edessa back they could have uh taken a lot of it at various times and didn't they did make like one

56:46 or two kind uh sort of attempts but didn't but gave up, basically. And as long as they had access to Trebizond by land and sea, Trebizond is along the Black Sea coast, as long as they had access there, they were fine. So they were happy with Edessa, and Edessa's just going to end up, It's so close to Mosul, and Mosul is so powerful. Once Zengi takes over and begins to consolidate, which we'll talk about next time, but once he consolidates everything, Edessa's right there. And if you're an expansionist state in the region, which they all are or would aspire to be.

57:31 It's a very obvious point, especially when you either rule or have a puppet.

57:40 Ruler in Aleppo. Right. It does cut pretty deep into Muslim territory, which, I mean, at the same time makes it vulnerable. I mean, it's more vulnerable, I think, than the coastal states to what eventually winds up happening. So that's a double-edged sword for sure. So let's also talk, we talked in the bonus episode that we did at the end of last season, which people should go back and listen to if you haven't listened to it yet, recently released. We talked about a number of campaigns that the Crusaders undertook to take coastal cities, to take and kind of secure the territories around Jerusalem. But we left out the Crusade of 1129, and the reason I wanted to leave it out because I think it is more

58:34 applicable here. What happens in the Crusade of 1129? Why is it important? Baldwin II undertakes this campaign in part to sort of smooth over the transition to Fulk of Anjou, who marries Melisande, his daughter, I believe, and becomes king of Jerusalem by marriage, beginning a long and not necessarily great tradition of of people trying to marry into the Jerusalem crown. So that's part of it. And also, just because this crusade focused on Damascus, and I think that's going to be a recurring theme when the crusaders somewhat inexplicably decide to end the Second Crusade by going after Damascus, even though Damascus and Jerusalem were not on terrible terms at that point, there is still this idea that Damascus

59:27 is important and we should try to try to take it to secure our position here. So talk about what goes on in this campaign.

59:35 Well, I think.

59:36 That this is an interesting one because the decision to sort of shift towards Damascus, again, has a bit to do with the way that people think about the world because Damascus, that's a name.

59:51 That's a name in the Bible.

59:53 And that it is where People get converted on the road to, et cetera. And quite literally, if you're some French guy, yeah, and you hear Damascus is falling, you're like, oh, no, not Damascus, because I know what that is. Right.

1:00:10 Whereas if you're like Odessa, they're like Odessa. you know, a bit less, you know.

1:00:15 It means more, it means more to the people who live next door.

1:00:18 Right.

1:00:19 Um, and they're like, Oh yeah, that, that does sound bad.

1:00:21 Um, and I do think that also part of this has to do with the intrinsic role that Damascus played in the first crusade.

1:00:31 Right.

1:00:32 And it's like, Ooh, all this work, all the work that went into taking Damascus gone. And so that seems like something that needs to be righted. This seems like something that needs to be done away with at once. And I know that it seems strange because I keep talking about narrative and imagination and the way that people think about these things, but this is a propaganda battle.

1:01:00 essentially and these people can't really be curtailed in any meaningful way as a result of the way they they think right and as a way as a result of the way that governments at the time function or do not.

1:01:14 Yeah so with the crusade of 1129 it's it's very interesting for a couple of reasons first of all it's one of the ones that we don't actually know if it has um Prior papal dispensation, there's questionable. The sourcing on it is not very good. I don't know which side is the prevailing one. I don't really think there is one. Regardless, the Pope was Honorius II. He didn't stop it. So, I mean, you draw your own conclusions there.

1:01:51 But it was also different because this was not crusade that was preached by the clergy. Baldwin II sent his top guy, Hugh Dupin, to essentially France and had him go around and tell, you know, uh tell the sob story pass around the hat and say hey why don't you come uh why don't you come to the holy land and help us out and defend oh and by the way you'll also you know you could get land you could become a new marcher lord you could become this that or the other and at the same time this was intertwined with as you said the marriage of uh the rich uh widower folk of anjou to Baldwin II's daughter and chosen heir, Melisande. They get married. The group that comes essentially almost exclusively from France, they bring

1:02:55 Falk over. He arrives. He's married to Melisande, and they have a son named the next year who is baldwin the third um who's born just after uh the crusade of 1129 fails and they do this of course because this is the prevailing custom of the time uh even if baldwin the second wants his daughter to rule uh she needs a uh she needs i mean.

1:03:22 Let's speak you have to have a man you have to have a man it's a patriarchal society folks we all we know how it is uh i mean at the time, even more patriarchal than today somehow.

1:03:33 But, you know, they come over there, they get this army together that's a combination of these Frenchmen and various soldiers from the Crusader states. They pull them all together. They essentially play on internal, on infighting between the Muslim polities again. At this point, the Hashishin, also known as the assassins, controlled some territory and, uh, they actually got in a fight with Damascus and so ceded some of their territory, uh, near Banias to the Crusader States. I believe it was Jerusalem. Um, and, uh, the Latin armies, they moved on Damascus, but, uh, there was a really bad rainstorm that stopped them from going and internal dissension on the Crusader, uh, The Crusader State side caused it

1:04:31 to break down, and some of them saw it as like a sign from God. The rains that went on for a few days as like a sign from God that they needed to stop. And eventually they backed off. Damascus, in order to get them to back off, decided to pay them a small price. small amount every year. And that was basically that. So they didn't, they didn't take anything, uh, really, uh, folk did, but, but folk did get married, uh, to Millicent day and they did have a son. So that assured quote unquote, the, uh, succession, uh, here. Um, and yeah, crusade of 1129 was another just bewildering failure. Like, okay, we showed up at Damascus, uh, Okay, we're going to go home now.

1:05:21 The idea that the Crusaders were undone by internal strife is really unheard of, I think.

1:05:25 Yeah, totally.

1:05:26 Guys, guys, check this shit out. Hugh to Payne for my real friends. Real Payne for.

1:05:35 My to Hugh friends.

1:05:38 Thank you that's excellent fantastic we should just uh just end it there thank you no um oh my god this seems like a road not taken in some in one respect which is the uh crusade that doesn't get preached but is just the the brainchild of some warlord uh in the region like bohemond does the same thing in 1107 right he goes back himself to france and recruits for a new crusade, which of course just winds up fighting the Byzantines and fizzles out. But this does feel like, again, part of the process of formalizing crusading is people doing things that are informally crusading or that wind up looking like informal crusading. And it feels like these are, this is an option or an alternative that winds up falling out of favor when Bernard and Eugene

1:06:37 make this an institutional thing.

1:06:40 Well, yeah, I mean, and that's part of what they're kind of going for. They want to be able to have more control over what is or is not a crusade because if you just have like every guy running in from the Outremer to ask for help, they don't have control over that. They want it to be less of an individual franchise and they want to centralize church authority with these things, which is their entire deal, right?

1:07:04 That's their entire way of relating to things. And it's kind of ironic because, I mean, probably the people who actually live there are better placed, you know, to tell you what needs to happen and who should be attacked where.

1:07:16 But, you know, I don't know, something got on your side, something, something.

1:07:20 Yeah.

1:07:21 So as a last, as a kind of the final thing to talk about here, because, and, you know, partly because Luke brought them up, you have the emergence of the military orders. I don't want to go too deep on the military orders, but they will be a thing in this season where they were not, obviously, in the first season. We will hopefully do a bonus episode that goes deeper into the Templars and the Hospitallers and company, but we do have these entities that emerge after the success of the First Crusade that draw people from Europe to the region and that serve sort of the function of maintaining institutions related to pilgrimage and other, you know, aspects of why these states exist. We also have the

1:08:14 assassins who we can also talk about maybe in a bit more detail. They're not a huge presence in the second crusade, but they are involved in a couple of cases where, And then, of course, there's a very scandalous involvement in the Third Crusade that we can talk about next season. But what can we say just in sort of rough terms about the emergence of the military orders in this early period?

1:08:45 This is just incredibly important because this is going to be a function and a feature of the rest of the medieval period. And indeed, until Napoleon gets to Malta. these guys are going to be around, right? So here they are, they're here. And part of the appeal of the varying crusading orders is what if you are a third, fourth, fifth son from a not particularly wealthy family, and so therefore you're for the church because there are no lands, but being a monk is kind of gay.

1:09:19 Well.

1:09:21 Great news, right?

1:09:22 So you say you're a biffo boy, you want to ride horse, you want to hit things with sword, you want to have this incredible swashbuckling lifestyle. This recruits incredibly heavily from those particular echelons of society. And they're able to recruit particularly heavily because they get mad donations from Because, again, the thing that all Europeans want to do some day.

1:09:48 Is they want to go to Jerusalem, which is why all of this is happening. And they imagine these.

1:09:53 People sort of as the bodyguards that are going to allow them to do this. These are the people who are making a safe passage for them so that they can see the wonders of Jerusalem. Of course, they also are providing banking services there. As a result of that, and indeed, even by the Third Crusade and beyond, these people are not knights in any meaningful sense. They are almost exclusively just offering banking services. So, you know, I don't agree with the dissolution of the Templars, but also, come on, man.

1:10:28 Let's be so.

1:10:30 Serious about what these guys are doing, right? So they are occupying a really important space culturally for a number of different reasons and i mean they still do to this day i mean the headspace that the knights templar live in rent free of so many dudes uh is is quite astounding even to this day.

1:10:54 Yeah i mean uh so the thing i think to know now about the templars and the hospital are the hospitalers is that they are there they do engage in, uh, in this crusade and they are a part of it. But, um, so like, you, you know, you do start to have that idea of like the, the red cross on the white field, uh, guy with, with chain mail, you know, that sort of stuff. If you're thinking about it in your head, you, you, you, you probably do start to see that here, but they're not a really huge and distinguished military force, uh, until a little after this, and just before the Third Crusade, they're going to become a very big focal point of Saladin, because they do some stuff that he definitely does not approve of, and he

1:11:50 singles them out for a lot of punishment. But we'll talk about that later. But basically, they're here. this is the start of the movement, uh, the Templars because Bernard won whatever propaganda war that went on and because he formed the Templars, um, and they were in like the model of the Cistercians, uh, so, so to speak, they're sometimes called military monastic versus military hospitaller. We can talk about that later, uh, in a bonus episode, but, um, because of that, the Templars have just this outsized presence in, uh, pop culture, um, despite, uh, really being dissolved pretty badly, uh, in, uh, the early 14th century by the King of France. Um, and, uh, yeah, but they're, they're here and they're going to be a factor. Some, um,

1:12:49 Some chroniclers say that they are at fault for the quote-unquote betrayal that happens at the end of this. And we could talk more about what that is come the end. But yeah, they're here. You know, everybody project, now that mental projection that you have of the Crusades is slightly more disturbing. Yeah, it's good now.

1:13:13 Yeah, it fits now.

1:13:14 Absolutely.

1:13:14 Really an excellent question. cautionary tale about the uh dangers of lending money to somebody who can kill you if he doesn't want to pay you back you know like legally just kill you uh good uh good good good thing to keep in mind uh for everybody if you're going to get into the money lending business so i think that sets us up pretty well we're sort of on the eve of the fall of edessa We're in the mid-1140s. Next time we'll talk about what's happening in the Muslim world and the fall of Edessa, and that'll really kick things off and get us rolling, go from there to Bernard, and then we'll really be trucking. So thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And thanks to all of you guys for participating,

1:14:07 as always. And yeah, pick up episode two and we'll keep going.