The Crusades A Timewatch Guide

900 years ago, the Christians of Western Europe

launched the First Crusade.

Vast armies marched on the Holy Land,

bent upon the reconquest of this sacred territory

from its Muslim overlords.

Determined to seize back from Islam the holiest site

in the Christian cosmos -

the city of Jerusalem.

These warriors believed their mission was inspired by God.

Their Pope had proclaimed that fighting and killing Muslims

would cleanse their Christian souls.

This is how the Crusades began

and how they would continue for 200 years.

This medieval story fascinates our modern world -

which some believe it has helped to shape.

And over the last 60 years, the BBC has sent cameras to join historians

and follow, like I have done, in the footsteps of the Crusaders.

To make sense of the contradictions...

Richard the Lionheart, one of the stars of English history.

Actually, he was French.

..the conflict...

The Crusaders broke in and began their vicious slaughter of the Muslim faithful.

..and the characters that shaped this 200-year story.

Now, I want to use the BBC's unique archive to explore how

our understanding of the Crusades has changed,

to dispel the myths that shroud their history.

And to ask whether this medieval clash between Islam and the West

really does cast its shadow over the modern world,

as so many have claimed.

That was the view expressed by Timewatch in 1983.

Just months after Christian forces in Lebanon

massacred up to 3,000 Muslims at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

To understand the present, presenter John Tusa turned to the past.

Now, the history of both sides goes back

well beyond the foundation of modern Lebanon 40 years ago

and beyond the involvement of the imperial European powers

in the last century.

Today's bitterness is inextricably bound up

in the history of Byzantium and Islam and the wars and massacres

at the time of the First Crusade.

If that's true, modern conflicts in the Near East are still

intimately connected with events that began in 1095.

With the Christian Church divided and in crisis.

In the west, Rome's authority was being challenged by kings and emperors.

In the east, Muslim Turks were overrunning Christian Byzantium.

Its great capital, Constantinople, was under threat.

Worse, the sacred places of the Holy Land were in Muslim hands.

The Byzantine emperor was forced to turn for help to his European rival.

Pope Urban II used this turmoil to reassert his own papal authority,

with a sermon that galvanised Europe's Christians

against a common enemy.

"A grave report has come from the lands of Jerusalem that

"a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God, has invaded the land

"of those Christians and has reduced the people

"with sword, rapine and fire."

Pope Urban declared a holy war

and invited Christians across Europe to enlist.

In return for fighting in this new war in the Holy Land,

the Crusaders were promised forgiveness of their sins

and the prospect of a heavenly reward.

It was an extraordinary proposition -

one that fused violence and religion -

and one that would shape the relationship between Christendom

and Islam for centuries to come.

But there was more, Pope Urban conjured up

a compelling justification for his holy war.

"These men have destroyed the altars polluted by their foul practices.

"They have circumcised the Christians,

"either spreading the blood from the circumcisions on the altars

"or pouring it into the baptismal fonts.

"And they cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment

"with loathsome death, drag them around and flog them,

"before killing them as they lie prone on the ground

"with all their entrails out."

This anti-Islamic onslaught was peppered with propaganda

and probably bore little resemblance to reality in the Near East,

but it was the genesis of the Crusades.

Nine centuries later, in 1995,

medievalist and Monty Python star Terry Jones

examined the consequences in a series which he wrote and presented.

It offered insights from some of our foremost historians.

What the Pope was proposing was of war as a penance.

A penitential war.

A war which assisted a man towards salvation.

War as a devotion.

And if one thinks of fasting,

penance, prayer as devotions -

this is war as the equivalent of prayer.

Now, I can think of no precedent in Christian history for that.

There were many moments of satire, as you'd expect from a Python.

Like Jones' comic interpretation of Pope Urban's message to crusade.

'A pilgrim adventure.

'Your priest says, "Go!"

'Your bishop says, "Go!"

'Your Pope says, "Go!"

'Take the cross to Jerusalem

'as pilgrims in arms.

'Ride with the heroes!

'Get your place in heaven by sending infidels to hell!'

Of course, the church didn't actually have movies,

but they did have, for the first time, a means of mass communication

and the Crusade was the first message to go on general release.

The impact was stunning.

Indeed, it was.

Pope Urban's sermon gave birth to a mass movement.

Tens of thousands of Christians from across Europe rushed to

enlist in this new sacred war.

Intent upon the Holy Land's reconquest.

But were they driven by faith, or by greed?

The conquering knight belongs to the world of chess.

A game that is universal.

It is the archetypal game

of conquest and dominion,

a metaphor of colonialism.

1977's The Age Of Uncertainty

was presented by Washington economist JK Galbraith.

He saw a parallel between the Crusades and the Vietnam War.

Two cynical ventures, each in the name of colonialism.

900 years ago, when the game of chess passed into Western Europe,

its pieces had a firm physical reality.

Their counterpart in life was the Crusaders and the Crusades.

The myth was of men of the highest religious purpose

committed to the redemption of Jerusalem from the infidel

and to saving the Eastern Christians in Constantinople from the Turks.

The unavowed motive was land and wealth.

Preaching the First Crusade in Clermont in 1095,

Pope Urban II was careful to say that good property

would be available for the Christian taking in the Holy Land.

And so, beneath the cross,

beat hearts responding to the age-old appeal

of good real estate.

To most historians today, this view now seems outdated.

A product of its time.

The idea of this being kind of a parallel with Vietnam -

that's very much the outcome out of the ethos

of 1960s and '70s historians who very much reduced the Crusaders

to a bunch of land-grabbing, greedy proto-colonialists

who only went to the Middle East in order to become rich.

There was a sense of apocalypse in the late 11th century,

that something really serious was happening that required men

to do something about it and that sweeps through all of Western Europe.

So, Urban is clearly galvanising a society

that is already very anxious.

Among the first to respond to the call to crusade

were the Knights of Europe,

like Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon,

Robert of Normandy -

wealthy men with plenty to lose.

The idea that Raymond of Toulouse and many like him

joined the Crusades simply in search of material gain

doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.

Raymond actually walked away from one of the richest lordships

in Europe to join this expedition.

And like many of his fellow Crusaders,

he probably expected to die in the East.

In fact, I think it's clear on the basis of contemporary evidence,

that Raymond and most other Crusaders really believed

that the coming campaign would cleanse their souls of sin.

The devotion, chivalry and heroism of these knights has become

the dominant narrative of the Crusades.

But on the long march to the Holy Land,

the Crusaders engaged with an array of cultures

and on television, as in academia,

their perspectives have often been overlooked.

There are multiple and many sources that don't get read by

Western medieval historians and there are reasons for that.

One, I suppose, is that we've prioritised Latin as the root language

that we teach students and our children and so on

and so engaging with Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic

is something that we're just not educationally set up to really do.

So, when people think of the Crusades as being

a kind of cosmic struggle, they're missing out the perspective

of Eastern Christianity altogether.

Terry Jones shone a light on one such alternative perspective

by revealing the shocking experiences

of the Jews of Germany's Rhineland.

They were the first to face the righteous wrath

of the Crusader hordes heading east.

RABBI SINGS

All of a sudden, like a thunderbolt in 1096 at the beginning

of the First Crusade, a horrible pogrom -

a horrible destruction -

which destroyed the community.

Bands of marauders

attacked the Jewish quarter.

Some tried to find refuge at the bishop's palace,

at the bishop's residence.

After all, they were privileged and they were protected by imperial decree -

which it didn't help.

The tombs of the victims can still be seen in the Jewish cemetery

at Worms in Germany.

It seemed nonsense to march 3,000 miles

to kill Muslims in the Holy Land.

People at that time about whom they knew virtually nothing,

when the people who had - or so the Crusaders believed -

actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps.

Henceforth, every time a Crusade to the Holy Land was called,

there were pogroms against Jews back home.

The Crusaders continued east, heading first for Constantinople,

the city begging for Europe's help to see off the Muslim threat.

Simon Sebag Montefiore travelled to modern-day Istanbul

to understand the Crusades from the perspective of the Byzantines -

and of their emperor Alexius.

He'd hoped for a battalion or two of well-trained knights,

what he got was the Crusades.

It was as if the entire world of the West, from the Adriatic

to the Straits of Gibraltar, had come here to Constantinople

and the Crusades really were an extraordinary and enormous

movement of people - 80,000 of them - some of them in unruly mobs

and some in organised princely armies, but they all came here.

The first wave that arrives here behave like football hooligans

on tour who've had too much to drink.

So, they steal lead off the roofs of the churches,

they go berserk through the city.

Riot police methods are put into place to make sure that the city stays safe.

They behave in a way that the polite society in Constantinople

just thinks is absolutely horrific.

And Alexius, the emperor at that time,

who was the architect of the Crusade,

had real concerns that he's let a genie out of the bottle.

The Crusaders prepared to march on into the Holy Land.

In 1961, research students from Cambridge University

made the same journey.

They travelled in two minibuses, accompanied by a BBC cameraman.

The narrator was David Attenborough.

'The expedition's vans had to cross from Europe into Asia Minor

'by car ferry over the Bosporus -

'a distance of a mile and a half at this point.

'The crusading armies numbered between 60,000 and 100,000 people,

'all of them had to be ferried across the Bosporus,

'together with their stores and horses.

'Every vessel, from galleys to rowing boats, must've been

'commandeered by the Crusaders.

'No doubt the Greek emperor, Alexius, who ruled the city,

'gladly helped them on their way.

'Here, there is water, but from now on the countryside becomes

'dusty, dry and, in parts, almost desert.

'The soldiers of the First Crusade now began the most gruelling

'march southwards towards Anatolia.'

These conditions proved more deadly than any enemy.

As Terry Jones experienced,

walking through the arid wilderness in medieval armour.

When the Crusaders set off down this road,

they could have had little idea what lay in store for them.

One Crusader wrote home that they would be

in Jerusalem in five weeks

but this road led to two years of hell.

The army marched into a valley called Malabrunias.

There was a countless multitude in the overwhelming heat of August.

Then the day came when the great shortage of water became

acute among the people.

Gaping with open mouths

and throats, they tried to catch the thinnest mist to cure their thirst.

It could not help them at all.

And so, overwhelmed by the anguish of thirst,

as many as 500 people gave up the ghost on that same day.

Before the Crusaders reached northern Syria,

thousands were dead.

Yet, the survivors marched on

until, in October 1097,

they reached one of the mightiest cities of the East,

the Muslim occupied stronghold of Antioch.

The Crusaders chose to lay siege,

but now, as the winter turned savage,

cold and malnourishment threatened to wipe out the remaining pilgrims.

In his series, The Normans, historian Robert Bartlett

described how this Crusade now teetered on the edge of disaster.

After a few months, the Crusaders had eaten all the supplies of food.

Horses died by the thousand

and the Christian army was riddled with disease.

Earthquakes and strange lights in the sky

were interpreted as signs of coming doom.

Some of the Crusaders, including several of the leaders,

simply crept away.

The First Crusade was close to collapse.

But a Norman knight stepped in with a plan to seize Antioch,

save the Crusade

and create his own Christian state in the Holy Land.

His name was Bohemond.

Bohemond had a secret agent inside the city,

Firouz, one of the commanders of the city's defences.

He was willing to betray the Muslim garrison

by leaving a tower undefended.

Bohemond's troops prepared to attack.

Just before dawn, on June 3rd 1098,

they arrived at the Tower of the Two Sisters.

One of Bohemond's knights reports

that they came to a ladder which was securely fastened to the city walls,

"..and about 60 of our men went up it."

They quickly seized the tower

and then opened the great gates of the city to the Crusader army.

The Crusaders flooded into the city

and began a slaughter.

As they murdered many of the city's inhabitants,

they were unable or unwilling to tell the difference

between a Muslim and an Eastern Christian.

Antioch was the first city in the Holy Land

to be sacked by the Crusaders

and its streets were left running with blood.

There can be little doubt that the Crusaders saw this brutality

as an act of sacred penance.

In fact, Western medieval accounts are peppered

with descriptions of Crusader violence.

The challenge for the historian is to assess the reliability

of these accounts

because getting it wrong can be incendiary.

In 1995, a sequence in Terry Jones's series began with a sober

assessment of how violence became a way of life to Crusaders.

For some Crusaders, there was no need for earthly leaders.

There was now a core of savage fanatics convinced that they

were marching under the direct command of heaven

with a sacred mission of butchery.

You are dealing with very, very violent people.

After every engagement on the First Crusade,

the Crusaders would return to the camp

with the heads of the Muslim slain on spears

and even, on one occasion,

they have Muslim prisoners of war

carrying spears with their colleagues' heads on.

Jones's exploration of Crusader violence continued

when he considered an exceptionally controversial episode.

50 miles south of Antioch, at the little town of Ma'arrat al-Numan,

the flames spread out of control

and produced one of the most disturbing events

in this terrible journey to Jerusalem.

"In Ma'arrat, our troops boiled pig and adults in cooking pots.

"They impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled."

"I shudder to tell you that many of our people, harassed by the madness

"of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens

"already dead there, which they cooked.

"And when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire,

"they devoured it with savage mouth."

I think Jones mishandled the representation of this

notorious atrocity,

highlighting an extreme but ill-informed account,

labelling another's testimony as eyewitness when it was not,

all while ignoring the most authoritative Crusader evidence

and the Muslim perspective.

Arabic Muslim historiography, there's not a single mention of any

cannibalism link to the conquest of Ma'arrat al-Numan.

And if there had been any cannibalism,

they certainly would have mentioned it because, from an Arab Muslim

perspective, again, this would have been a rather unusual deed.

Arabic chroniclers may not have known about it, but the best Crusader

evidence suggests there was an outbreak of cannibalism at Ma'arrat,

though, crucially, one driven by starvation

and not reflective of routine Crusader savagery.

To then make a great deal of the fact that there was cannibalism

happening at Ma'arrat al-Numan is problematic.

I wouldn't wish people to take that away as the overriding

image of the Crusades.

Debate about what happened at Ma'arrat will continue,

but as the First Crusaders marched on southwards,

there was more bloodshed on the horizon.

In the series Jerusalem, The Making Of A Holy City,

Simon Sebag Montefiore recounted the expedition's last

desperate weeks as, after travelling thousands of miles,

the pilgrims at last laid eyes on their sacred prize.

On Tuesday, 7th June 1099 in punishing heat,

the Crusaders finally received the reward for all their suffering.

They emerged from the hills around Jerusalem to see before them

this city of the King of Kings

and before them, too,

the tomb of their Lord Jesus Christ.

By nightfall they were encamped around Jerusalem.

Far from home, the Crusaders' choice was stark...

..death or victory on the ramparts of the holy city.

For the Crusaders, victory meant one thing,

the liberation of Jerusalem

and an end to an era of supposed Muslim aggression and tyranny.

The First Crusaders had been fed the papacy's message

of Islam's systematic abuse of Eastern Christians and pilgrims.

But was there any truth to these accusations

or was it pure papal propaganda?

Terry Jones was in no doubt.

For him, the arrival of the First Crusade at the walls of Jerusalem

in 1099 marked the end of an entirely unnecessary enterprise.

The truth is, Jerusalem was and always had been

a multicultural city,

sacred not just to Christians but to Jews and Muslims alike.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all venerated the city

and respected each other's right to do so.

You had a mixture of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Jews were indispensable for finance,

Christians for administration and it was a big city.

About 100,000 people is the estimate

and the Christians had their own quarter.

That whole area, that was all the Christian quarter,

separated from the rest by its own wall.

Did the Christians in Jerusalem need rescuing?

Not really.

The idea that the Christians of the Near East needed to be saved

is really not at all obvious. Not from any sources I have read.

We hear the story told through the prism of conflict.

There is also another side to that story,

which is the story of the contacts

and the non-conflictual encounters

between peoples from Western Europe and peoples of the Near East.

Terry Jones revealed one such peaceful encounter

between Christians and Muslims,

a centuries-old tradition still practised today.

Christians were, in fact, being helped by the Muslims.

This is not a daring secret escape by a Christian priest held prisoner.

It's the daily ritual of opening the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The gentleman with the key, who has the privilege of locking

and unlocking the church in this rather strange way, is a Muslim.

His family claim they were given this responsibility

when Muslims first conquered Jerusalem

and guaranteed Christians the right to worship there.

The Nusaybah family do it now

and they were doing it when the Crusaders arrived.

But for the Western Christians encamped around the walls

of Jerusalem, there could be no turning back.

Their divine goal was finally within their grasp.

Simon Sebag Montefiore gave what, in my view,

is a sensationalised account of what happened next.

In almost the last moment,

the Crusaders identified the weakest point in Jerusalem's defences

and somewhere around here, they rolled up their siege engines

against the wall where it was lowest and fought their way into the city.

Simultaneously, they broke in through the southern walls, too,

and began their vicious slaughter of the Muslim faithful,

whether citizens or soldiers.

The battle raged for hours.

The Crusaders killed everyone they could find

in the streets and alleyways.

They didn't just chop off heads, but also feet and hands,

delighting in the fountains of cleansing infidel blood.

They seized babies from their mothers

and dashed their heads against the walls.

Ultimately, they hacked and diced so much human flesh

that they literally rode up to their bridles in blood.

The fleeing Jerusalemites took refuge on the roofs

of the Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock,

but the Crusaders smashed their way

onto this crowded sacred esplanade.

Some Muslims leapt to their deaths.

Jews sought refuge in their synagogues,

but the Crusaders set them on fire.

After 48 hours,

the slaughter was over.

From a 21st century perspective,

the close union between violence

and Christianity can seem almost inconceivable,

an abomination.

But the Crusaders lived in a different age,

the medieval age,

and I think that there can be little doubt

that many, if not most of them,

really believed that they were doing the work of God,

freeing Jerusalem and killing for Christ

and thereby opening their own path to heaven.

The Christians' savagery described in Western chronicles

may even have been overstated,

exaggerated by Latin historians

to emphasise the Crusaders' devotion to God.

Their gruesome descriptions are certainly in stark contrast

to early Arabic records.

All the massacres, atrocities and barbaric acts which we find in Latin

and old French chronicles hardly appear in the Arabic chronicles.

So when they write about the conquest of Jerusalem,

the longest contemporaneous description which we have are three lines.

The only barbaric acts Muslim authors report about Christian

conquerors is a massacre of Jewish population in Jerusalem.

But the First Crusade had, without doubt, succeeded.

Jerusalem was in the hands of Western Christianity

and the Crusaders had to adapt to their new role,

no longer an invading army,

but rulers of a region in which

Eastern Christians, Jews and Muslims

had been living side-by-side for centuries.

When the First Crusaders conquered cities like Antioch

and Jerusalem, they carried out bloody massacres

but, in time, Western European settlers in the East

began to adopt a more pragmatic approach,

negotiating, trading,

sometimes even cooperating with their Muslim neighbours.

Some Westerners even began to Orientalise.

To adopt habits and practices from Eastern cultures.

In 1961, David Attenborough imagined this cultural shift

taking place within the great Crusader castles.

From the moment the Crusaders arrived here,

a process of Orientalisation began.

In these fallen halls,

the knights, and the ladies they had brought with them,

drank the local wines from goblets made by Turkish silversmiths.

The best chambers were floored with rich Persian carpets.

Knights began to grow beards in Muslim fashion

and to veil their wives.

Many received guests seated cross-legged, in Oriental style.

And Tancred of Antioch wore a turban

with a cross in front, for the sake of appearances.

But outside the Crusader states, the Islamic world was changing.

Muslims gradually began to react to the coming of the Crusades,

rekindling their own form of holy war.

Jihad.

Terry Jones introduced his audience to a man often depicted

as the first jihadi of the crusading era.

An ambitious Turkish warlord called Zengi.

His stronghold was Aleppo,

but he was intent on expanding his power.

Zengi was a Turk of the old school, a restless,

hard-drinking warrior, always on the lookout for new conquests.

So, in 1144, he and his army

and his elite corps of engineers rode out of Aleppo,

heading for the most vulnerable outpost of the Crusader kingdom.

His target was their very first conquest, Edessa.

And it was here that Zengi undermined the very foundations

of Latin rule in the East.

The ground was quite literally dug away from under the Crusaders' feet.

Zengi's engineers lit the blue touchpaper and retired.

SINGING

The Fall of Edessa was celebrated throughout the Islamic world

as the first real blow against the Christian invaders from the West

and Zengi was hailed as the first leader of the holy war, the jihad.

Islam's network of tribal leaders began at last

to unite against the Crusaders,

behind Zengi and the jihad.

In 2012, I met a leading scholar of Islamic history, Taef Al Azhari,

to understand how the literature of Islam

sheds light on jihad and the Crusades.

The art poetry from pre-Islamic time through the Islamic history

was one of the tools to galvanise society

and you have thousands of lines of poetry.

Let me read you just a few lines.

HE READS IN ARABIC

Here, the poet is reminding the Muslim community about how important

Jerusalem is and he's calling for its capture and the only way

to capture it is through blood, which would purify Jerusalem.

In the 12th century, the torch of jihad was taken up

by a new, powerful Turkish dynasty, the Zengids.

In the name of Islam, they conquered great

swathes of territory in the East and brought the promise of a new era,

one in which the Christians might be driven from the Holy Land.

In 1146, the Sunni warlord, Nur al-Din Zengi, came to power.

In the course of his career, he united Aleppo and Damascus,

consolidating the Zengid hold on Syria

and pushed their rule further into Egypt.

But rising up through the ranks of his armies was an ambitious Kurdish soldier.

Born Yusuf, son of Ayyub, he is known to history

by the honorific title, Salah al-Din, "goodness of the faith".

In the Western tongue, Saladin.

By the 1100s, the two branches of Islam,

Sunni and Shia, had been feuding for centuries,

and Saladin found himself at the heart of this conflict.

Saladin was a Sunni Muslim, placed in control of Shia forces in Egypt.

For anyone else it would have been an impossible position.

But Saladin possessed the strength of leadership not only to

suppress a Shia rebellion, but also to unite Egypt under his own rule.

And when Nur al-Din died five years later,

Saladin saw his opportunity.

He married Nur al-Din's widow, seized power in Damascus

and expanded into northern Syria and Mesopotamia.

Vowing to wage a glorious jihad and reclaim Jerusalem,

Saladin assumed the title of Sultan and united the Muslim Near East as never before.

By the 1180s, his empire stretched from the Nile to the Euphrates,

but the promise of victory in the holy war now had to be fulfilled.

Saladin's primary objective was to orchestrate a decisive

confrontation with the Christians,

luring them into open battle where he hoped

they could be destroyed with one fatal blow.

In 1187 he assembled a huge force, some 40,000 strong,

and masterminded a strategy in which the key weapons would be

local knowledge, guile and water.

First, he attacked the Christian town of Tiberius.

He expected the Crusaders to retaliate, and had a plan.

He secured a source of water for his own army and then ordered

his men to fill in every accessible well and spring for miles around.

He would destroy the Christians when they came with thirst,

and all he had to do was wait.

To understand Saladin's genius,

Terry Jones visited the very scene of the battle.

The whole army of the kingdom swallowed Saladin's bait

and marched towards Tiberius.

They got as far as these two hills, the Horns Of Hattin.

Well, the Franks were coming from the West,

trying to reach the lake of Tiberius over there,

and Saladin tried and succeeded in blocking their way to the lake.

And, of course, it is dry here, there's no water up on the Horns.

There is no water not only here on the Horns, but in the close vicinity,

and that is why the Franks were so thirsty and so desperate.

Having fallen into Saladin's trap, the Christians now found themselves

in a hellish waterless killing zone, cut off from Tiberius and the lake.

Driven half mad by thirst, faltering under a rain of arrows,

the Christians gathered on the Horns Of Hattin to make a forlorn last stand,

launching a desperate downhill charge towards Saladin's men, and destruction.

"I saw the limbs of the fallen cast naked on the field of battle,

"lacerated and disjointed with heads cracked open, throats slit,

"spines broken, necks shattered,

"members dismembered, noses mutilated, breasts flayed,

"spirits flown, their very ghosts crushed

"like stones among stones."

Saladin destroyed Jerusalem's army and captured its king.

The holy city was his for the taking.

In September 1187, Saladin's army surrounded the city.

Simon Sebag Montefiore brought to life the scene inside,

where everyone expected a massacre.

BELLS TOLL

Women prayed for mercy at the sepulchre.

Without a king, the Jerusalemites appointed

a respected baron, Balian, to lead them.

As Saladin's troops attacked the city,

the walls were defended by mere boys.

So Balian made an uncompromising offer.

He told Saladin, "First we will kill all our own women and children,

"then we will demolish your Dome of the Rock and your Al-Aqsa mosque,

"and only then will you get the city."

To save Islam's holy places,

Saladin agreed to negotiate a peaceful surrender.

But the Christians would still pay a heavy price.

All the Jerusalemites would be ransomed or enslaved,

but for Saladin this was the fulfilment of his entire life's work.

Saladin got Jerusalem.

The loss of Jerusalem shocked Western Christendom.

On hearing news of the disaster in the East,

the Pope promptly had a heart attack and died.

In the months that followed a new call to arms was issued,

demanding vengeance for Hattin and the recovery of the holy city.

This grand expedition would be led by a legend of the crusading era,

one of England's most controversial kings,

Richard The Lionheart.

We revere Richard The Lionheart.

There's a statue of him with sword drawn outside the Houses of Parliament.

Richard is the archetypal English hero,

and so I think there is a disconnect between the reality

and what he was really like, because in the 19th century, in fact,

English historians would write about Richard that he wasn't even English,

that he was an awful husband, awful son, awful warrior.

Richard The Lionheart - one of the stars of English history.

Actually he was French. Richard Coeur de Lion.

He couldn't even speak a word of English.

Nevertheless, for the Brits he is the greatest hero of the Crusades.

Richard was an extremely undesirable man.

He was a bad son, a bad husband, a very bad ruler.

But he was a magnificent soldier

who took a great deal of trouble over his men.

So, in a way, it was easy to make a hero of him.

Richard has become a legendary figure,

but most historians now agree that he was not only a military genius

but also an able diplomat and skilled statesman.

Terry Jones focused on the most controversial moment of Richard's Crusade,

which began as a joint project with King Philip of France,

picking up the story as they arrived at the siege of Acre.

When Richard and Philip arrived, this very citadel

was in the hands of Saladin's troops.

They'd been under siege by the local Franks for the last two years.

It had dragged on that long because the defenders could always get supplies in by sea.

However, Richard and Philip had a big enough fleet to be able

to stop all that sort of nonsense.

Eventually, on 12 July 1191, the Saracen garrison decided they'd had enough and capitulated.

It was agreed that the Muslims would be set free in return for 200,000 gold dinars,

1,500 Christian prisoners and the holiest of holy relics,

the fragment of the True Cross that Saladin had captured at Hattin.

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out like that at all.

You see, the garrison had come to these terms without actually referring to Saladin,

and there was no way he could raise that sort of money in the time.

Eventually, Richard, who was impatient to get on to Jerusalem,

and who didn't want to be encumbered with nearly 3,000 prisoners,

grew tired of waiting for his money.

So he simply had the entire garrison chained up outside the city walls,

along with their wives and family, and slaughtered.

It took three days to kill them all.

Jones's account was again embroidered.

Eyewitness testimony indicates that the killing was completed

in one day, not three, and makes no mention of women and families.

Nonetheless, such a large-scale systematic massacre was not common,

even in the medieval world.

Contrast that with other massacres committed by military leaders.

When Zengi captured Edessa,

he did kill a number of its inhabitants,

but that was in the hurly-burly of war,

in the hurly-burly of a siege,

and the success of his siege, and the aftermath of that siege,

whereas Richard's action did not have that contextual

"justification".

The brutal massacre at Acre gave Richard the opportunity

to march south to Jaffa, resting his men frequently

and refusing to be drawn into open battle.

This self-assured strategy began to unsettle Saladin.

Eyewitness testimony from within Saladin's camp tells us

that he was deeply frustrated by Richard's inexorable advance

and wrong-footed by the Lionheart's policy of resting his troops every two to three days.

What the Sultan needed now was to engineer a confrontation, a pitched battle.

In the morning, Richard and his men set out for Arsuf

and were almost immediately met with the full strength of Saladin's army.

The Sultan had decided that this was where the Franks would be stopped.

Richard ordered his men not to engage,

but overcome with bloodlust, his knights charged at Saladin's forces.

Richard could see there was now no turning back.

He spurred his horse, led the rest of his men into the melee

and smashed the Muslim army.

Saladin fled back to Jerusalem,

taking up a defensive position inside the city.

A Christian siege now seemed inevitable

and his generals advised Saladin to leave,

rather than risk being trapped inside.

Saladin wavered but he knew that if he left the city,

his generals would surrender it to Richard.

The thought of abandoning his prize was too much.

Still a few days' march away,

Richard realised that even if he captured Jerusalem,

he would not be able to hold her

while Saladin's vast empire was intact.

Richard's only option was to negotiate.

First, Richard wrote to Saladin.

"The Muslims and the Christians are both done for.

"The lands are ruined at the hands of both of us.

"All we have to discuss is Jerusalem, the True Cross

"and the territories.

"But, Jerusalem is the centre of our worship,

"which we will never renounce."

Saladin replied to this.

He said, "Jerusalem is as much ours as yours.

"But it is greater for us

"because it is the place that our Prophet visited

"on his night journey."

Either way, there was a big problem in the way of a deal,

both men wanted to possess Jerusalem totally.

And so, on the 2nd September 1192,

the Sultan and King agreed the Treaty of Jaffa.

The first partition of Palestine.

The Christian kingdom received a new lease of life,

with Acre as its capital.

Saladin kept his treasured Jerusalem,

only granting the Christians access to the Holy Sepulchre.

Richard, it seemed, had got the raw end of the deal.

Richard's Crusade was, at best, a limited success.

He recovered a thin strip of coastal territory

but never reclaimed Jerusalem.

Yet, he has become an icon of British history.

Britain's connection with the Crusades is fairly tenuous

and fairly patchy.

We don't really have much to do with the whole process,

apart from Richard.

So, we've taken the idea of the Crusades being good things,

we've taken King Richard, who took part in the Crusades.

We've put the two together and go,

"It doesn't really matter what he's really like.

"Maybe we didn't quite understand.

"And Saladin seemed quite a nice guy too.

"So, let's try to create a romantic story about Richard

"and hang all sorts of baggage onto it."

I suppose, in that, in itself, goes the Western view of the Crusades.

Saladin is also often remembered as a legendary hero of the age.

Though historians continue to debate

whether he was driven first and foremost

by personal ambition or authentic, pious devotion

to the cause of Jihad

and Jerusalem's reconquest.

The overriding impression you get, in both Arabic

and Latin sources of the time, are that this is a man of greatness

and a man of unusual leadership qualities.

And he behaves in a way that Western gentlemen think is appropriate.

So, there's a renaissance of Saladin's reputation,

also in the Arabic speaking world, as a result of the fact

he becomes so highly prized and valued in the West.

The Crusader states endured in the aftermath

of Richard and Saladin's Treaty of Jaffa.

Then, in 1248,

the French King Louis launched yet another assault on Islam.

A meticulously planned Crusade

to reclaim the Holy Land from its Muslim overlords

by destroying the source of their wealth and power in Egypt.

It was a disaster.

The French army was routed on the banks of the Nile

and the King himself taken prisoner.

The French Crusaders were crushed by a new kind of army.

One more ruthless than any previously encountered

in the Levant.

And led by a slave soldier

for whom the Crusader states were little more than a sideshow

on the path to the Near East's total conquest.

This warrior initiated the last bloody chapter

in a 200-year war for dominion of the Holy Land.

In places like Egypt,

he's still revered as a great Muslim hero of the age.

But, in the West, his name is barely known.

Terry Jones was one of the first

to bring this man's story to a Western TV screen, in 1995.

Baybars was leader of the Mamluks.

Now, the Mamluks were the slave soldiers of Egypt.

Generally, they were captured as small children

and brought back to Egypt to be trained exclusively as warriors.

They knew of no other life except warfare and, what's more,

they'd been hardened in over 100 years of battles with the Crusaders.

Under the leadership of Baybars,

the Mamluks swept everything before them.

They created a state whose whole purpose was war.

One of the first targets was Antioch.

Once it was captured, the gates were sealed

and every Christian man, woman and child was butchered.

The Mamluk war machine moved from town to town,

from castle to castle, tearing stone from stone

and killing the inhabitants,

destroying the last remnants of the Crusader kingdom.

In May 1291, the Mamluk army laid siege to Acre.

Inside, its Christian rulers were isolated and outnumbered,

their fate inevitable.

This was to be the bloody conclusion to 200 years of crusading.

Which, in 1977,

JK Galbraith likened to America's chaotic flight from Saigon.

The attackers at Acre promised a bloodbath

for any surviving Christians and such promises, in those days,

had to be taken very seriously.

As later in Saigon, to have planned for an evacuation

would have been to concede defeat in advance.

So, instead, at the last moment,

there came the wholly anarchic rush to escape.

In Vietnam, only the words were different.

Is there any other way we can get the hell out of here?

Maybe travel with you guys, or something?

As at Acre, we came with the cash,

this time it was for space on the planes and helicopters.

These were faster than the galleys and the trip was over more quickly.

By this much, had colonial enterprise, effort to govern,

shape development from afar changed in 700 years.

For Galbraith in 1977,

the Crusades were overwhelmingly a simple act of colonialism,

one that continued to shape the 20th century.

The long shadow of colonialism has been mentioned

and none is so long as that of the Crusades.

It remained in the memory of Islam that man had come from afar

with religious purpose and sanction to occupy Jerusalem

and to take up the land.

And it continued to be feared that one day they would come back.

It was inevitable that any who did return

would be viewed with the utmost hostility

and especially so if they claimed religious sanction.

It didn't matter too much whether those returning

were Christians or Jews,

the shadow of the Crusades is still over Israel.

That was 1977

but, in 1995, Terry Jones concluded his series with the same thought.

Probably, most Crusaders set out with the intention of doing good.

And yet, they ended up perpetrating

one of the great crimes against humanity.

What's more, the entire enterprise was a total failure.

The net result of all their efforts was the exact opposite

of what they'd set out to achieve.

Islam, far from being destroyed, learned to imitate Europe's rage.

Constantinople, far from being saved, never recovered.

Today, of course, it is a Turkish city, Istanbul.

And 900 years after it all began,

the world still lives in the long shadow of the Crusades.

But are we right to draw a line between the medieval Crusades

and the modern world?

To imagine that we still live in the shadow of these distant holy wars?

For some historians,

this idea represents a Eurocentric perspective.

One that greatly overstates and distorts the role

played by the West in shaping the history of the East.

For Europe, the Crusades were a historic moment.

You cannot understand European medieval history without the Crusades.

If you want to understand Middle Eastern society,

forget about the Crusades.

They are so marginal, they only give a skewed view of what was going on.

The Crusades rank very low in the most important events.

That's reflected in the chronicles of the period.

Yet in the 21st century, leaders from both East and West

have used the Crusades

as justification for contemporary conflicts.

This crusade...

..this war on terrorism...

..it is going to take a while.

When George W Bush spoke these words

five days after the terrorist attack of 9/11,

many commentators were horrified.

That George Bush referred to the Crusades in the aftermath of 9/11,

is expression of the limited intellectual calibre

which was assembled among his advisers

because it was mere stupidity.

I think it abnegates responsibility for creating just solutions

for some of the political problems of the Middle East.

You know, the more we talk about the Crusades,

the more we talk about jihad and this is a continuity,

the more we validate acts of violence

because we live in a totally different world

than 1,000 years ago.

I think it's dangerous to talk about how similar,

how history is repeating itself,

and so on, without really pulling that through.

In my opinion, no direct line connects the medieval Crusades

and the modern conflicts that still rage in the Near and Middle East.

The long shadow of these holy wars

is largely the product of an illusion.

Born of the simplification

and manipulation of our collective history.

An illusion that can only be countered if we continue to explore,

to study and to seek to understand the actual history of the Crusades.