Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Anytime, any place, world history examined and science explained.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
This is one day university. Welcome.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli, back with another episode of
half hour History, Secrets of the Medieval World. Last episode,
we heard the shift from fighting nights to.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
Acts of chivalry.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
This week, we're leaving Europe to study abroad in Jerusalem.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
That's right, it's time for the Crusade. It's fun.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Chris will also explain why the Holy Land is so
holy for Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Chris, the floor is yours.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
So now we begin a topic that's a loaded term,
the Crusades, and when you study the Crusades, it's very,
very complex. I'm only going to do one topic on
it now. It's the kind of topic that really needs
its own focused study, but we'll do the best we can.
I want you to notice that I've chosen to talk
about the Crusades in terms of Jews, Christians and Muslims
(01:29):
as opposed to simply a military event, because the Crusades
is the culmination, the high point, and in some ways
the low point of this clash of cultures and this
mixing of the three dominant cultures in the ancient world.
And the story of Byzantium is going to come in
again as well, and we're going to tell the story
(01:52):
whats and all. The Crusades has been politicized in many ways,
particularly since nine to eleven in the United States, and
that doesn't concern us here. What concerns us here is
what is the history. When you talk about the Crusades,
you actually have to begin by talking about pilgrimage. Because
the Crusaders, and when I say the Crusaders, I'm talking
(02:13):
about Western Christians. The Crusaders would have seen themselves as
armed pilgrims.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Strikes us as.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Odd, but we have to think the way they thought
and not the way we think. We have to think historically,
and pilgrimage is one of the major themes of courtly
chivalric literature, as we saw in Mallory's Death of King Arthur,
that we are all on a journey, and the medieval
(02:41):
person had a very strong notion of this. The medieval
person lived with death all the time. Childbirth was dangerous.
If you cut your hand on a plow and the
plow was rusty and it was infected. This is an
age before penicillin. So death is a daily experience for
(03:01):
these folks. They know they're going to die and they
want to get to heaven after they die. And so
the notion, you know, when we use this expression, they
they say it's going to rain today, They say that
that's the conventional wisdom. That expression they, you know, meaning everybody.
In the Middle Ages, they would have used this word
via torres, meaning the pilgrims, the people who.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
Were on their way.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was their way of saying they And this word
homo viataur a via tour is a pilgrim, a person
on a via on a way. Homo does not mean
men or women, but it means everybody, humankind. Everybody is
on a spiritual journey, and the physical journey of our
life is a mirror of.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
The spiritual journey as well.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
There were lots of local pilgrimage sites, so if you
lived in a certain region of Spain, there might be
a local pilgrimage site to a local saint. But there
were three big ones in the Middle Ages, and they
were Jerusalem in the Holy Land, Santiago di Compostella in Spain.
(04:10):
And a lot of people still walk or bike the
road to Santiago de Compostella. Even today it's a big
event in the summer, especially in Europe, in Spain, and
then in the British Isles Canterbury where Thomas Beckett was
martyred in the year eleven seventy.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
So these are the Big three.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
And there are lots of spiritual and physical dangers on
these journeys. The physical dangers are obvious. You have to
travel a great distance. You are open to hunger, you
are open to thirst, you are open to shipwreck, you
are open to thieves.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
But spiritual dangers as well.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Let's say you go to Santiago di Compostella and you
get the prize. The prize was a little scallop shell
that you would wear on your clothing like a mark,
a badge of honor. If you went to Jerusalem, it
was a little palm, and you were allowed to sign
documents with your last name Palmer after it to say
that you had made that. Well, you might think that
(05:12):
you're closer to Heaven than your neighbor who didn't.
Speaker 4 (05:14):
Make the risk.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
So there are some spiritual dangers as well, and some
of the spiritual writers of the time say, hey, listen,
you go on pilgrimage right in your own house every day.
You don't have to go on that big journey because
you're on a pilgrimage to God right there. Nevertheless, people
like to travel then and now, and Jerusalem was the
pilgrimage site of pilgrimage sites in that period of time.
(05:38):
And when you went there to Jerusalem, you would visit
a circuit of buildings that were built starting around the
three thirties. So Constantine in three twelve decides that God,
the God Jesus, the Son of God, had given him
a great victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge,
and he begins to favor Christianity. His mother Helena always
(06:03):
listened to. Your mother says, well, listen, and we should
go to Jerusalem, and we should find the sites of
the connected to the life of this god man Jesus,
and we should build buildings there. And he says, okay,
And so they do that in the three twenties, in
the three thirties, and they build a church domed church,
a Romanesque church or Basilica called the Anastosis right there.
(06:27):
And then their resurrection and then they build something on
the site of the crucifixion called the martyrium right there,
and then bit by bit over time, other memorials are
built at the site of Mary's House, at the site
of Lazarus's.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Tomb in Bethany.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And the building that Constantine puts up in the three
thirties is stands for nearly seven hundred years until it's
burned down in a fire in the year ten nine
on orders from a caliph named Hakim in Egypt. Even
the Muslim sources call him the man king, the mad
(07:06):
Calif Haakim. And then it's rebuilt a little bit in
that century, and then once the Crusaders take Jerusalem in
ten ninety nine, they really build it up again.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
So Jerusalem was a site for pilgrims, but was also.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
A scholarly center. There were lots of documents there. After
the library at Alexandria burns down, the library at Jerusalem
becomes a scholarly center, and Jerome. When he gones to
translate the Bible into Latin, he goes there to Jerusalem
to do it. He lives in Bethlehem and kind of
commutes back and forth. Now, let's look at this word crusades.
(07:42):
What does this word even mean? The word crusade Now,
an English word comes from the Latin word crux, meaning cross,
and a cruchot tor was one who took up the cross,
because remember that the Crusaders would paint a red cross
on their shields and or their tunics, which they wore
(08:03):
over their armor, to say that they are taking up
the journey, they are taking up the defense of this
place where Jesus was crucified. And the word Crusades and
what it means has become a loaded term. It was
a loaded term then and it's a loaded term now.
And it's very hard to unpack history from myth and
(08:26):
modern applications from myth and history as well. And we're
going to try to do that just a little bit
in this short time. When I give public lectures on
the history of the City of Jerusalem or Crusades, I
ask people why is the Holy Land holy to Jews,
Christians and Muslims? And I say, let's take it in turn.
(08:49):
Why is the Holy Land holy to Jews? And most
people look at me and they say, well, duh, Why
is the Holy Land holy to Christians? And they say duh?
But I say why is the Holy Land holy to Muslims?
And they say, huh. Because people generally don't know, oh
non Muslim audiences don't know why Jerusalem is the third
(09:10):
holiest site to Islam, after.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
Mecca and Medina. So the Jews.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
For the Jews, the Holy Land is the land given
by Yahweh to Abraham and his descendants. And I will
make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky,
as we read in the Bible.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
For Christians, it's the sight of Jesus's.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
Life, death, and resurrection, what's sometimes called the passion or
the charigma, the crucial teaching of the Easter events. But
for Muslims, Jerusalem is important because of something called Mohammed's
night journey. So somewhere in Mohammad's life the six tens,
the six twenties, somewhere in there we read in the
(09:58):
Koran that Mohammed is praying. He's transported as he prays
from where he's praying to a dist shrine. He puts
his feet down on he lands, if you will, on
a rock. He mounts a white steed or a met
white ox, depending on the translation, and he goes up
to heaven. He comes back down again, he dismounts, and
(10:19):
then he returns, and that's known as Mohammad's Night Journey.
So Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and one of the reasons
why it's so sad when we see what's going on
in the Holy Land today is that remember that Jews, Christians,
and Muslims are all Monotheists. They share belief in a
single unified God, which is different from the polytheists around
(10:42):
them at the time. And so there's an element of
a blood feud, of a family feud from the very
beginning of the history of Jerusalem until our own day.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
We're taking a quick break, but when we're back, Chris
details two hundred years of multiple crusades.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
What's the Christian context of the Crusades. Pope Urbancond doesn't
wake up in France on one morning on ten ninety
five and say, hey, let's go on the Crusades.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
The Christian context is the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims,
which started in seven point thirty two, went to fourteen
ninety two, but the key moment was the fall of Toledo.
Toledo in ten eighty five, and Toledo is just about
the middle of the box of the Iberian Peninsula and
the Muslims were really great, great warriors, and so the
(11:42):
fact that the Christians could finally push Toledo back and
take control of it gave the papacy the notion, hey,
if we can beat the Muslims here in the West,
maybe we can indeed beat the Muslims there all the
way over in the East. And so this movement of
the reconquest in Spain had an impact on what was
(12:04):
going on in the East, and it gave the pope
the idea that we could take the Holy Land back from.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
The infidel or the pagans.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Now that word makes us uncomfortable in an age of
inter religious dialogue today, but remember that two Muslims Christians
are the infidel.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
To Christians, Muslims and Jews.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Are the infidel, the unfaithful ones, and sometimes they even
call each other.
Speaker 4 (12:28):
Pagans, and it goes both ways. Let's do a little TikTok.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
I'm not necessarily a big fan of one damn thing
after another history, but if we take a look at this,
we could see how rapidly the Crusades was, like a
two hundred year movement and then it dissipates. So let's
just walk through that chronology a little bit. So in
the year ten ninety five, Urban, the second ten years
(12:54):
after the fall of Toledo in Spain, gives a speech
where he says, we've got to go and.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Defend the Holy Land.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Defend that's interesting notion, huh, because the Muslims are already
there and the Christians are gonna go. Doesn't that look
like an offensive operation. Well, remember to the Christians, they
would have seen it as a defensive operation to take
their land, the Holy Land, back from So it's interesting
that Muslims and Christians both see the Crusades as a
(13:23):
defensive war.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
Sounds like a.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
Logical impossibility, but it is the absolute key to understanding
what was going on. And in that speech he pronounces
that this is God's will and in Latin that is
deus vault, in French deus lo vault. And so in
movies where you want to describe the Crusaders as fanatics,
(13:46):
you see these people.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Yelling Davus vault, Daeus vault all the time.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
And people pledged to take up the cross, to paint
the cross on their bodies, on their clothing, and that
they would go to protect pilgrims and to help the
East because the Byzantine Emperor had sent a request to
the Western Pope saying, hey, these Muslims are getting a
little close.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
I could use some help over here.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
So the Pope has all sorts of explanations, and some
people would call them pretexts for going over there to
protect pilgrims, to take the land back in a defensive war,
and to help our Eastern Christian Greek brothers, which is
a little bit odd because usually they're fighting with each other.
So there is a sense of pretext certainly on that
last one. If you are a Western Latin Christian and
(14:29):
you define success as taking Jerusalem, then the only crusade
which was successful in that limited term would have been
the first crusade. So people leave in the year ten
ninety six, the year after the speech by Pope Urban
the second, and they go to Jerusalem, and in the
(14:51):
summer of ten ninety nine the Christians take over Jerusalem.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
And then what happens.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
The Muslims quickly re assert themselves, they fight back a
little bit, and then there's a second crusade in eleven
forty seven to eleven forty nine, preached by Bernard of Clairvaux,
praising these knights of the Temple or the templars which
were founded between the First and Second Crusade, and Bernard
(15:19):
sees these guys as monk knights, as we saw in
the topic before ours. So the Christians are responding to
Muslim advances, but the Muslims are just too good. And
in eleven eighty seven, under a great Islamic general and diplomat,
he was a very interesting man named sal Aladdin, and
he comes across in English translations as Saladin. Saladin takes
(15:44):
Jerusalem in eleven eighty seven after a battle at a
place called Hatton, called the Horns of Hatten. And so
the Third Crusade from eleven eighty nine to eleven ninety
two was the Christian response to the Muslim recapture of
Jerusalem under Saladin in eleven eighty seven.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Doesn't work.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
The Christians cannot take Jerusalem back. So now there's a
fourth Crusade from twelve oh two to twelve oh four.
So you can see now it's only one hundred and
ten years since the speech by Urban and we're already
on our fourth crusade. And the fourth Crusade is an
absolute abomination, a complete disaster. The Christians can't even get
(16:25):
anywhere near Jerusalem. So they got their eyes set on Constantinople,
which is a very rich city. And if you remember,
one hundred years before, Pope Urban the second said we
need to go help our Christian brothers in the east.
And those Western Nights say, well, what do you mean
by help? And so they go to Constantinople and they
(16:47):
don't offer help, they take They burn Constantinople.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
They don't burn it.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
To the ground, but they burn it and they plunder
and they pillage and they rape, and the abominations against
women are recorded. And these are brother and sister Christians.
So you can see that the crusading movement, it's just
lost its way. It's lost its impetus, it's lost its sanctity,
(17:13):
if you want.
Speaker 4 (17:13):
To use that word.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
It's lost its religious influence, and it's become this mayer
of greed and blood.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
And fight infighting.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And so when these Western Latin Christians attack Eastern Greek Christians,
they take the city over briefly, and even the Pope
in Rome starts appointing local bishops and this this tremendous
battle between so it's almost like you have a little
civil war between Western Latin Christians and Greek Eastern Christians.
Within this mega war between Muslims and Christians taking place
(17:47):
as well, there's another little crusade. And now the numbering
of the crusades breaks down here a little bit, because
the people at the time wouldn't have called it the
first Crusade or the Second Crusade or the third Crusade.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
They would just have called it the Crusades.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Let's remember that in our own memory, world War wasn't
called World War One in nineteen fourteen or nineteen sixteen.
It was called the Great War, the War to end
all wars. World War One wasn't called World War one
until World War Two came along and they had to
rename the prior one. So the numbering really breaks down here.
But there's this very awful episode that takes place in
(18:24):
the year twelve twelve called the Fifth or the Children's Crusade,
And we need to put children's in quotation marks because
the story of this crusade, which is this disastrous debacle,
is focuses on this word pueri. Pueri is a word
which means children. A poo ara is actually a boy,
(18:47):
but pooeri is also a word that's used interchangeably with
popoor as meaning the poor people. So it's rather unlikely
that a bunch of nine year old boys and girls
went off on crusade, and highly likely that a bunch
of peasants who had nothing to lose, wars so and
such abject poverty, they had nothing to lose, were whipped
(19:07):
into a frenzy by a bunch of preachers and they
decided to go off and try to fight a crusade
totally unarmed, totally unprepared, without provisions, without money, and the
whole thing barely gets out of Italy, and most of
those people are captured, killed and sold into slavery. So
you could see that the crusading ideal wrapped up in
knighthood and chivalry reaching back to el Sid and the
(19:30):
Song of Roland is.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Just collapsed at this point.
Speaker 3 (19:34):
And there's the end of this part of the story
really is in twelve ninety one, where the last Christian
stronghold in the Holy Land is lost. So this kind
of fervor lasted about two hundred years, from ten ninety
five to twelve ninety one. Now, within that chronology, I'd
like to look at some special topics. The notion of
(19:56):
just war and jihad, Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims
a little more closely, and the notion of crusading against
heretics few words on each.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
The idea of.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Just war, not oh just war, but a war that
is justified, a war that is just reaches back into
Hebrew scripture from Deuteronomy, reaches back to Plato in the
Greek world, Cicero in the Roman world that is pre
Christian times. But it's really Christianity that takes on the
(20:30):
notion that there are certain circumstances in which war is justified.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
Jihad which is.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
A word that is often related to nine to eleven
and a fatwah that was issued, a command that was
issued by Osama bin Laden, whether or not he had
the authority to issue it. And jihad is, in modern,
particularly American terms, a war of radical Islam against Western civilization.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
That's not what jihad is.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Jihad in the Quran and in Muslim teaching is a struggle,
a striving to do good, and the great jihad is
the struggle against yourself, and the lesser jihad is the
struggle against someone else, a physical, armed struggle. And what
we find are these similarities and differences between Christians and
Muslims when it comes to just war. And she had
both of these ideas, by the way, mixed up in
(21:21):
the Reconquest, bubbling around in the Reconquest, and then coming
to fruition in the Scholastic movement.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
But you find among Christians and Muslims that they agree
for a war to be justified, there must be the
big three.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
There must be the right intention, there must be a
just cause, and there must be a legitimate authority. So violence,
think now of the peace and truce of God in
the last topic. Violence is not intrinsically evil, but it
is deemed necessary. Right.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
You think of the fact that you would.
Speaker 3 (21:55):
Never hit your neighbor, But if your neighbor came at
you with a knife to attack your husband or wife
or children, you wouldn't think twice about you violence against
that person.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
We would call something if it led to the point
of death, justifiable homicide. Right. That's something common that we
live with. So this notion, in just words she hot
is that violence is not intrinsically evil, but it is
deemed necessary in certain limited circumstances of a right intention,
a just cause, and a legitimate authority, And A lot
(22:27):
of this is played out in the Spanish context. Christians
and Jews. Wow, when we talk about the Crusades, won't
think about Christians and Muslims. Yes, But in Christians and
Jews are tied up in the Crusades as well, and
particularly in two incidents. One is I mentioned earlier than
in the year ten oh nine. The Church of the
Holy Sepulcher that had been built by Constantine in the
(22:48):
three thirties with his mother Helena, was burned down in
ten oh nine by a character that even the Muslim sources,
as I said, call the mad Caliph Hakim, who happened
to be in Egypt. Now through some very strange twists
and turns far from that area in France, a bunch
of Christians decide that the Jews in their area had
(23:10):
somehow from France put Jakim up to it and paid him,
bribed him to issue an order from Egypt to burn
down the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem totally
you know, literally unbelievable, and that led to a massacre,
a pogrom of these French Jews. In fact, in the
(23:31):
Second Crusade, the First Crusade, a bit in the Second
Crusade especially, there were programs along the Rhine against Jews,
because now the Knights are traveling.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
On land, and they're going to go to the Rhine
and the Danube and get on.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Ships because it's quicker and cheaper to transport their horses
and their armor along these ships. And they write and
they say to each other, listen, now you have to
really think historically here. Let's not condone this, but think
of how they're thinking. We're going all the way over
there to kill the infidel the page, to defend our
(24:07):
land against the Muslims who despoil the land of Jesus.
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Aren't there Jews among us? They say?
Speaker 3 (24:15):
And aren't those Jews responsible for the killing of Jesus?
A fact that the Catholic Church no longer teaches, but
at that time was common information.
Speaker 4 (24:24):
Isn't it true that that's what happened? And as we.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Go along, can't we avenge the death of Jesus along
the way. Isn't that kind of two for one? We
can kill the Jews and then kill the Muslims. It's
an awful way of thinking. It turns our stomachs, but
that's how they were thinking, and it's right there in
the sources, and in fact, we have accounts of Jews
who commit suicide rather than convert at that period of
(24:51):
time Christians and Muslims. One of the interesting things is
when you read accounts of the Crusades we have lots
of accounts of the Crusades on both sides, is that
there's this odd grudging admiration queen Christians and Muslims of
the military skill. We see Muslims and Christians saying, boy,
(25:12):
these warriors are fierce. Now it could be that they're
building up their enemy to make their victory either side,
to make their victory bigger. Right If I say my
enemy cannot be killed and he's a monster and the
whole bit, and I beat him, then my victory is
all the better. So there's this admiration, not always begrudging
of the military skill, but real misunderstanding about the other's
religious beliefs. It's kind of interesting to hear Muslims talk
(25:35):
about Christians and Christians talk about Muslims.
Speaker 4 (25:37):
But then you get some insights.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
For instance, Christians believe in a trinity of father, son,
and Spirit. There's one Muslim source that says when the
Christians pray, they pray by God, by God, by God.
Now that's interesting because it says that the Muslims had
some understanding of this trinity. So there was some interaction
the very end of our period. The crusading indulgence that
(26:01):
if you fight and you die, you'll go straight to
heaven gets transfer from fighting outside the faith, fighting the
infidel the Muslims to inside the faith. The idea of
crusading is transferred to within, and so if you fight heretics,
then that is going to help you get to heaven
as well.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
So crusading has developed over.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
Time, and ride about the time the Crusades wears out,
something happens that no one saw coming, The Black Death.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Thanks for listening to another episode of Half hour History
Secrets of the Medieval World.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Next week, The Plague is Coming. The Plague is coming.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Half our History Secrets of the Medieval World from One
Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and School
of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a review
in your favorite podcast app and check out the Curiosity
Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture, true crime.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
School of Humans